
THE LIBRARY 

OF 

THE UNIVERSITY 

OF CALIFORNIA 

RIVERSIDE 



Shelburne Essays 



By 

Paul Elmer More 



Third Series 



Tc'vt ^(^py} KpiveaOat to. fxiWovra KaAcj? KptOrjcrcadat ; 
ap OVK ifJLTTupLa re Kal <f)pov^cra kol Aoyw ; 

Plato, Republic. 



G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York and London 
Cbe IRnicJ^erbocher ipress 

1907 



I 

\ 



Copyright, igos 

BY 

PAUL ELMER MORE 



Published, September, 1905 
Reprinted, January, 1906; December, 1906 
October, 1907 



Zbe ftnichccbociter prees, Dew Koch 



ADVERTISEMENT 

The last essay in this volume, though written several 
years ago, has never before been printed. For permission 
to reprint the other essays thanks are due to the pub- 
lishers of the Atlantic Monthly, the Independent, and 
the New York Evening Post. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Corrkspondenck of Wilwam Cowper . i 

Whittier the Poet 28 

The Centenary of Sainte-Beuve ... 54 

The Scotch Novei3 and Scotch History . . 82 

Swinburne 100 

Christina Rossetti 124 

Why is Browning Popular ? .... 143 

A Note on Byron's "Don Juan" . . . . 166 

Laurence Sterne i77 

J. Henry Shorthouse 213 

The Quest of a Century 244 



SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

THIRD SERIES 



THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WILWAM 

COWPER 

Ip, as I sometimes think, a man's interest in 
letters is almost the surest measure of his love for 
Letters in the larger sense of the word, the busy- 
schoolmaster of Olney ought to stand high in 
favour for the labour he has bestowed on com- 
pleting and rearranging the Correspondence of 
William Cowper.^ It may be that Mr. Wright's 
competence as an editor still leaves something 
to be desired. Certainly, if I may speak for my 
own taste, he has in one respect failed to profit 
by a golden opportunity ; it needed only to 
print the more intimate poems of Cowper in 
their proper place among the letters to have 

' The Correspondence of William Cowper. Arranged 
in chronological order, with annotations, by Thomas 
Wright, Principal of Cowper School, Olney. Four vol- 
umes. New York : Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1904. 

VOL. HI.— I 

I 



2 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

produced a work doubly interesting and per- 
fectly unique. The correspondence itself would 
have been shot through b}^ a new light, and the 
poetry might have been restored once more to its 
rightful seat in our affections. The fact is that 
not many readers to-day can approach the verse 
of the eighteenth century in a mood to enjoy or 
even to understand it. We have grown so accus- 
tomed to over-emphasis in style and wasteful effu- 
sion in sentiment that the clarity and self-restraint 
of that age repel us as ungenuine; we are warned 
by a certain frigiis at the heart to seek our com- 
fort elsewhere. And just here was the chance for 
an enlightened editor. So much of Cowper's 
poetry is the record of his own simple life and of 
the little adventures that befell him in the valley 
of the Ouse, that it would have lost its seeming 
artificiality and would have gained a fresh appeal 
by association with the letters that relate the 
same events and emotions. How, for example, 
the quiet grace of the fables (and good fables are 
so rare in English!) would be brought back to us 
again if we could read them side by side with the 
actual stories out of which they grew. There is a 
whole charming natural history here of beast and 
bird and insect and flower. Tlie nightingale which 
Cowper heard on New Year's Day sings in a 
letter as well as in the poem; and here, to name 
no others, are the incidents of the serpent and the 
kittens, and of that walk by the Ouse when the 
poet's dog Beau brought him the water lily. Or, 



CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER 3 

to turn to more serious things, how much the 
pathetic stanzas To Mary would gain in poignant 
realism if we came upon them immediately after 
reading the letters in which Cowper lays bare his 
remorse for the strain his malady had imposed 
upon her. 

A still more striking example would be the 
lines written On the Receipt of My Mother s Picture. 
By a literary tradition these are reckoned among 
the most perfect examples of pathos in the lan- 
guage, and yet how often to-day are they read 
with any deep emotion ? I suspect no tears have 
fallen on that page for many a long year. 

Oh that those lips had language ! Life has passed 
With tne but roughly since I heard thee last. 
Those lips are thine — thy own sweet smile I see, 
The same that oft in childhood solaced me ; 
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say, 
" Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away ! " 



Short-lived possession ! but the record fair, 

That memory keeps of all thy kindness there, 

Still outlives many a storm that has eflfaced 

A thousand other themes less deeply traced. 

Thy nightly visits to my chamber made, 

That thou mightst know me safe and warmly laid ; 

Thy morning bounties as I left my home, 

The biscuit or confectionary plum : 

The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestowed 

By thy own hand, till fresh they shone and glowed; 

All this, and more enduring still than all, 

Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall,—* 



4 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

do you not feel the expression here, the very 
balance of the rhymes, to stand like a barrier be- 
tween the poet's emotion and your own suscepti- 
bility ? And that confectionary plum — somehow 
the savour of it has long ago evaporated. Even 
the closing lines — 

Me howling blasts drive devious, tempest-tost, 

Sails ripped, seams opening wide, and compass lost — 

need some allowance to cover their artificial mode. 
And it is just this allowance that association with 
the letters would afford; the mind would pass 
without a shock from the simple recital in prose 
of Cowper's ruined days to these phrases at once 
so metaphorical and so conventional, and would 
find in them a new power to move the heart. 
Or compare with the sentiment of the poem this 
paragraph from the letter to his cousin, Mrs. Bod- 
ham — all of it a model of simple beauty: 

The world could not have furnished you with a present 
so acceptable to me, as the picture you have so kindly 
sent me. I received it the night before last, and viewed 
it with a trepidation of nerves and spirits somewhat 
akin to what I should have felt, had the dear original 
presented herself to my embraces. I kissed it and 
hung it where it is the last object that I see at night, 
and, of course, the first on which I open my eyes in the 
morning. She died when I completed my sixth year ; 
yet I remember her well, and am an ocular witness of 
the great fidelity of the copy. I remember, too, a multi- 
tude of the maternal tendernesses which I received from 



CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER 5 

her, and which have endeared her memory to me beyond 
expression. 

To read together the whole of this letter and of 
the poem is something more than a demonstration 
of what might be accomplished b}^ a skilful editor; 
it is a lesson, too, in that quality of restrained 
dignity, I had almost said of self-respect, which 
we find it so difficult to impress on our broken 
modern style. 

Some day, no doubt, we shall have such an 
interwoven edition of Cowper's prose and verse, 
to obtain which we would willingly sacrifice a full 
third of the letters if this were necessary. Mean- 
while, let us be thankful for whatever fresh light 
our Olney editor has thrown on the correspond- 
ence, and take the occasion to look a little more 
closely into one of the strangest and most tragic 
of literary lives. William Cowper was born at 
Great Berkhampstead in 1731. His father, who 
was rector of the parish, belonged to a family of 
high connections, and his mother, Anne Donne, 
was also of noble lineage, claiming descent 
through four different lines from Henry III. The 
fact is of some importance, for the son was very 
much the traditional gentleman, and showed the 
pride of race both in his language and manners. 
He himself affected to think more of his kinship 
to John Donne, of poetical memory, than of his 
other forefathers, and, half in play, traced the 
irritability of his temper and his verse-mongering 
back to that "venerable ancestor, the Dean of St. 



6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

Paul's." ' It is fanciful, but one is tempted to lay 
upon the old poet's meddling with cofl&ns and 
ghastly thoughts some of the responsibility for the 
younger man's nightly terrors. " That which we 
call life is hwi He bdomada morthim, a week of death, 
seven days, seven periods of life spent in dying," 
preached Donne in his last sermon, and an awful 
echo of the words might seem to have troubled his 
descendant' s nerves. But that is not 3^et. As a boy 
and young man Cowper appears to have been high- 
spirited and natural. At Westminster School he 
passed under the instruction of Vincent Bourne, 
so many of whose fables he was to translate in 
after years, and who, with Milton and Prior, was 
most influential in forming his poetical manner. 

I love the memory of Vinny Bourne [he wrote in one 
of his letters]. I think him a better Latin poet than 
Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in 
his way, except Ovid. . . . He was so good-natured, 
and so indolent, that I lost more than I got by him ; for 
he made me as idle as himself. He was such a sloven, 
as if he had trusted to his genius as a cloak for everything 
that could disgust you in his person. ... I remem- 
ber seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy 
locks and box his ears to put it out again. 

After leaving Westminster he spent a few 
months at Berkhampstead, and then came to Lon- 

' In a newly published volume of the letters of William 
Bodham Donne (the friend of Edward FitzGerald and 
Bernard Barton), the editor, Catharine B. Johnson, throws 
doubt on this supposed descent of Cowper's mother from 
the Poet Dean. 



CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER / 

don under the pretext of studying law, living first 
with an attorney in Southampton Row and after- 
wards taking chambers in the Middle Temple. 
Life went merrily for a while. He was a fellow 
student with Thurlow, and there he was, he "and 
the future Lord Chancellor, constantly employed 
from morning to night in giggling and making 
giggle, instead of studying the law. Oh, fie, 
cousin ! " he adds, ' ' how could you do so ? " This 
pretty "Oh fie! " introduces us to one who was to 
be his best and dearest correspondent, his cousin 
Harriet Cowper, afterwards Lady Hesketh, and 
who was to befriend him and cheer him in a thou- 
sand ways. It may introduce us also to Harriet's 
sister, Theodora, with whom Cowper, after the 
fashion of idle students, fell thoughtlessly in love. 
He would have married her, too, bringing an in- 
calculable element into his writing which I do not 
like to contemplate; for it is the way of poets to 
describe most ideally what fortune has denied 
them in reality, and Cowper' s task, we know, 
was to portray in prose and verse the quiet charms 
of the family. But the lady's father, for reasons 
very common in such cases, put an end to that 
danger. Cowper took the separation easily 
enough, if we may judge from the letters of the 
period; but to Theodora, one fancies, it meant a 
life of sad memories. They never exchanged 
letters, but in after years, when Lady Hesketh 
renewed correspondence with Cowper and brought 
him into connection with his kinsfolk, Theodora, 



8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

as "Anonymous," sent money and other gifts to 
eke out his slender living. It is generally as- 
sumed that the recipient never guessed the name 
of his retiring benefactress, but I prefer to regard 
it rather as a part of his delicacy and taste to 
aflfect ignorance where the donor did not wish to 
be revealed, and think that his penetration of the 
secret added a kind of wistful regret to his grati- 
tude, " On Friday I received a letter from dear 
Anonymous," he writes to Lady Hesketh, "ap- 
prising me of a parcel that the coach would bring 
me on Saturday. Who is there in the world that 
has, or thinks he has, reason to love me to the 
degree that he does? But it is no matter. He 
chooses to be unknown, and his choice is, and 
ever shall be, so sacred to me, that if his name 
lay on the table before me reversed, I would not 
turn the paper about that I might read it. Much 
as it would gratify me to thank him, I would turn 
my eyes away from the forbidden discovery." 
Could there be a more tactful way of conveying 
his thanks and insinuating his knowledge while 
respecting Theodora's reserve? 

But all this was to come after the great change 
in Cowper's life. As with Charles Lamb, a name 
one likes to link with his, the terrible shadow of 
madness fell upon him one day, never wholly to 
rise. The story of that calamity is too well known 
to need retelling in detail. A first stroke seized 
him in his London days, but seems not to have 
been serious. He recovered, and took up again 



CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER 9 

the easy life that was in retrospect to appear to 
him so criminally careless. In order to establish 
him in the world, his cousin, Major Cowper, 
oflfered him the ofl&ce of Clerk of the Journals to 
the House of Lords. There was, however, some 
dispute as to the validity of the donor's powers, 
and it became necessary for Cowper to prove his 
competency at the bar of the House. The result 
was pitiable. Anxiety and nervous dread com- 
pletely prostrated him. After tr>ang futilely to 
take his own life, he was placed by his family in 
a private asylum at St. Albans, where he remained 
about a year and a half. His recovery took the 
form of religious conversion and a rapturous be- 
lief in his eternal salvation. Instead of returning 
to London, he went to live in the town of Hunt- 
ingdon, drawn thither both by the retirement of 
the place and its nearness to Cambridge, where 
his brother John resided. Here he became ac- 
quainted with the Unwins: 

. . . the most agreeable people imaginable ; quite 
sociable, and as free from the ceremonious civility of 
country gentlefolks as any I ever met with. They treat 
me more like a near relation than a stranger, and their 
house is always open to me. The old gentleman carries 
me to Cambridge in his chaise. He is a man of learning 
and good sense, and as simple as Parson Adams. His 
wife has a very uncommon understanding, has read much 
to excellent purpose, and is more polite than a duchess. 
The son, who belongs to Cambridge, is a most amiable 
young man, and the daughter quite of a piece with the 
rest of the family. They see but little company, which 



lO SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

suits me exactly ; go when I will, I find a house full of 
peace and cordiality in all its parts. 

The intimacy ripened and Cowper was taken into 
the family almost as one of its members. But 
trouble and change soon broke into this idyllic 
home. Mr. Unwin was thrown from his horse 
and killed; the son was called away to a charge; 
the daughter married. Meanwhile, Mrs. Unwin 
and Cowper had gone to live at Olney, a dull 
town on the Ouse, where they might enjoy the 
evangelical preaching of that reformed sea-captain 
and slave-dealer, the Rev. John Newton. 

The letters of this period are filled with a trem- 
ulous joy; it was as if one of the timid animals he 
loved so well had found concealment in the rocks 
and heard the baying of the hounds, thrown from 
the scent and far off. " For my own part," he 
writes to I^ady Hesketh, "who am but as a 
Thames wherry, in a world full of tempest and 
commotion, I know so well the value of the creek 
I have put into, and the snugness it affords me, 
that I have a sensible sympathy with you in the 
pleasure you find in being once more blown to 
Droxford." Books he has in abundance, and 
happy country walks; friends that are more than 
friends to occupy his heart, and quaint characters 
to engage his wit. He finds an image of his days 
in Rousseau's description of an English morning, 
and his evenings difiFer from them in nothing ex- 
cept that they are still more snug and quieter. 
His talk is of the mercies and deliverance of God; 



CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER II 

he is eager to convert the little world of his corre- 
spondents to his own exultant peace; and, it 
must be confessed, only the charm and breeding 
of his language save a number of these letters 
from the wearisomeness of misplaced preaching. 

Cowper removed with Mrs. Unwiu to Olney in 
1767. Six years later came the miraculous event 
which changed the whole tenor of his life and 
which gave the unique character to all the letters 
he was to write thereafter. He was seized one 
night with a frantic despondency, and again for 
a year and a half, during all which time Mr. 
Newton cared for him as for a brother, suffered 
acute melancholia. He recovered his sanity in 
ordinary matters, but the spring of joy and peace 
had been dried up within him. Thenceforth he 
never, save for brief intervals, could shake off the 
conviction that he had been abandoned by God — 
rather that for some inscrutable reason God had 
deliberately singled him out as a victim of omni- 
potent wrath and eternal damnation. No doubt 
there was some physical origin, some lesion of 
the nerves, at the bottom of this disease, but the 
peculiar form of his mania and its virulence can 
be traced to causes quite within the range of lit- 
erary explanation. He was a scapegoat of his 
age ; he accepted with perfect faith what other 
men talked about, and it darkened his reason. 
Those were the days when a sharp and unwhole- 
some opposition had arisen between the compro- 
mise of the Church with worldly forms and the 



12 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

evangelical absolutism of Wesley and Whitefield 
and John Newton. Cowper himself, on emerging 
from his melancholia at St. Albans, had adopted 
the extreme Calvinistic tenets in regard to the 
divine omnipotence. Man was but a toy in the 
hands of an arbitrary Providence; conversion was 
first a recognition of the utter nullit}^ of the hu- 
man will; and there w^as no true religion, no 
salvation, until Grace had descended freely like a 
fire from heaven and devoured this offering of a 
man's soul. To understand Cowper' s faith one 
should read his letter of March 31, 1770, in which 
he relates the death-bed conversion of his brother 
at Cambridge. Now John was a clergyman in 
good standing, a man apparently of blameless life 
and Christian faith, yet to himself and to William 
he was without hope until the miracle of regenera- 
tion had been wrought upon him. After reading 
Cowper' s letter one should turn to Jonathan Ed- 
wards's treause on The Freedom of the Will, and 
follow the inexorable logic by which the New 
England divine proves that God must be the 
source of all good and evil, of this man's salvation 
and that man's loss: ' ' If once it should be allowed 
that things may come to pass without a Cause, 
we should not only have no proof of the Being of 
God, but we should be without evidence of any- 
thing whatsoever but our own immediately present 
ideas and consciousness. For we have no way to 
prove anything else but by arguing from effects 
to causes. ' ' Yet the responsibilit)' of a man abides 



CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER 1 3 

through all his helplessness: " The Case of such 
as are given up of God to Sin and of fallen Man 
in general, proves moral Necessity and Inability 
to be consistent with blameworthiness." Good 
Dr. Holmes has said somewhere in his jaunty way 
that it was only decent for a man who believed in 
this doctrine to go mad. Well, Cowper believed 
in it ; there was no insulating pad of worldly in- 
difference between his faith and his nerves, and 
he went mad. 

And he was in another way the victim of his 
age. We have heard him comparing his days at 
Huntingdon with Rousseau's description of an 
English tnorning. Unfortunatel)-, the malady 
also which came into the world with Rousseau, 
the morbid exaggeration of personal conscious- 
ness, had laid hold of Cowper. Even when 
suffering from the earlier stroke he had written 
these words to his cousin : " I am of a very singu- 
lar temper, and very unlike all the men that I 
have ever conversed with ' ' ; and this sense of his 
singularity follows him through life. During the 
Huntingdon days it takes the form of a magnified 
confidence that Heaven is peculiarly concerned in 
his rescue from the fires of affliction; after the over- 
throw at Olney it is reversed, and fills him with the 
certainty that God has marked him out among all 
mankind for the special display of vengeance: 

This ail-too humble soul would arrogate 
Unto itself some sigualisiug hate 
From the supreme indifference of Fate ! 



14 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

Writing to his mentor, John Newton (who had 
left Ohiey), he declares that there is a mystery in 
his destruction; and again to Lady Hesketh: 
" Mine has been a life of wonders for many years, 
and a life of wonders I in my heart believe it will 
be to the end." More than once in reply to those 
who would console him he avers that there is a 
singularity in his case which marks it off from that 
of all other men, that Providence has chosen him 
as a special object of its hostility. In Rousseau, 
whose mission was to preach the essential good- 
ness of mankind, the union of aggravated egotism 
with his humanitarian doctrine brought about the 
conviction that the whole human race was plotting 
his ruin. In Cowper, whose mind dwelt on the 
power and mercies of Providence, this self-con- 
sciousness united with his Calvinism to produce 
the belief that God had determined to ensnare and 
destroy his soul. Such was the strange twist that 
accompanied the birth of romanticism in France 
and in England. 

The conviction came upon Cowper through the 
agency of dreams and imaginary voices. The 
depression first seized him on the 24th of January, 
1773. About a month later a vision of the night 
troubled his sleep, so distinct and terrible that the 
effect on his brain could never be wholly dispelled. 
Years afterwards he wrote to a friend: 

My thoughts are clad in a sober livery, for the most 
part as grave as that of a bishop's servants. They turn 
upon spiritual subjects ; but the tallest fellow and the 



CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER 1 5 

loudest among tbem all is he who is continunlly crying 
with a loud voice, Adicin est de te ; pcriisti ! You wish 
for more attention, I for less. Dissipation [distraction] 
itself would be welcome to me, so it were not a vicious 
one ; but however earnestly invited, is coy, and keeps at 
a distance. Yet with all this distressing gloom upon my 
mind, I experience, as you do, the slipperiness of the 
present hour, and the rapidity with which time escapes 
me. Every thing around us, and every thing that befalls 
us, constitutes a variety, which, whether agreeable or 
otherwise, has still a thievish propensity, and steals from 
us days, months, and years, with such unparalleled ad- 
dress, that even while we say they are here, they are 
gone. 

That apparently was the sentence which sounded 
his doom on the night of dreams: Actum est de te; 
pcriisti — it is done with thee, thou hast perished! 
and no domestic happiness, or worldly success, or 
wise counsel could ever, save for a little while, 
lull him to forgetfulness. He might have said to 
his friends, as Socrates replied to one who came 
to offer him deliverance from jail: " Such words I 
seem to hear, as the mystic worshippers seem to 
hear the piping of flutes ; and the sound of this 
voice so murmurs in my ears that I can hear no 
other." 

But it must not be supposed from all this that 
Cowper's letters are morbid in tone or filled with 
the dejection of melancholia. Their merit, on the 
contrary, lies primarily in their dignity and re- 
straint, in a certain high-bred ease, which is 
equally manifest in the language and the thought. 



1 6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

Curiously enough, after the fatal visitation re- 
ligion becomes entirely subordinate in his corre- 
spondence, and only at rare intervals does he al- 
lude to his peculiar experience. He writes for the 
most part like a man of the world who has seen 
the fashions of life and has sought refuge from 
their vanity. If I were seeking for a comparison 
to relieve the quality of these Olney letters (and 
it is these that form the real charm of Cowper's 
correspondence), I would turn to Charles Lamb. 
The fact that both men wrote under the shadow 
of insanity brings them together immediately, 
and there are other points of resemblance. Both 
are notable among English letter-writers for the 
exquisite grace of their language, but if I had to 
choose between the two the one whose style pos- 
sessed the most enduring charm, a charm that 
appealed to the heart most equally at all seasons 
and left the reader always in that state of quiet 
satisfaction which is the office of the purest taste, 
I should name Cowper. The wit is keener in 
lyamb and above all more artful; there is a certain 
petulance of humour in him which surprises us 
oftener into laughter, the pathos at times is more 
poignant; but the effort to be entertaining is also 
more apparent, and the continual holding up of 
the mind by the unexpected word or phrase be- 
comes a little wearisome in the end. The attrac- 
tion of Cowper's style is in the perfect balance of 
the members, an art which has become almost 
lost since the eighteenth century, and in the spirit 



T 



CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER i; 

of repose which awakens in the reader such a feel- 
ing of easy elevation as remains for a while after 
the book is laid down. I,amb is of the city, 
Cowper of the fields. Both were admirers of 
Vincent Bourne; Ivamb chose naturally for trans- 
lation the poems of city life — The Ballad Singers, 
The Rival Bells, the Epitaph on a Dog : 

Poor Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie, 

That wont to tend my old blind master's steps, 

His guide and guard ; nor, while my sernce lasted, 

Had he occasion for that staff, with which 

He now goes picking out his path in fear 

Over the highways and crossings, but would plant 

Safe in the conduct of my friendly string, 

A firm foot forward still, till he had reached 

His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide 

Of passers-by in thickest confluence flowed : 

To whom with loud and passionate laments 

From morn to eve his dark estate he wailed. 

Cowper just as inevitably selected the fables and 
countrj'-pieces — The Glowworm, The jackdaw. 
The Cricket : 

Little inmate, full of mirth. 
Chirping on my kitchen hearth, 
Wheresoe'er be thine abode, 
Always harbinger of good. 
Pay me for thy warm retreat. 
With a song more soft and sweet ; 
In return thou shalt receive 
Such a strain as I can give. 

• • • • • 

VOL. Ill— 2. 



I8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

Though in voice and shape they be 
Formed as if akin to thee, 
Thou surpassest, happier far, 
Happiest grasshoppers that are ; 
Theirs is but a summer song, 
Thine endures the winter long. 
Unimpaired, and shrill, and clear, 
Melody throughout the year. 

Neither night nor dawn of day 
Puts a period to thy play : 
Sing, then — and extend thy span 
Far beyond the date of man ; 
Wretched man, whose years are spent 
In repining discontent, 
Lives not, aged though he be, 
Haifa span, compared with thee. 

There is in the bliud beggar somethiug of the 
quality of Lamb's own life, with its inherent lone- 
liness imposed by an ever-present grief in the 
midst of Ivondon's noisy streets; and in the verses 
to the cricket it is scarcely fanciful to find an 
image of Cowper's " domestic life in rural leisure 
passed." L,amb was twenty-five when Cowper 
died, in the year 1800, One is tempted to con- 
tinue in the language of fable and ask what 
would have happened had the city mouse allured 
the country mouse to visit his chambers in Hol- 
born or Southampton buildings. To be sure 
there was no luxury of purple robe and mighty 
feast in that abode; but I think the revelry and 
the wit, and that hound of intemperance which 
always pursued poor Lamb, would have fright- 



CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER I9 

ened his guest back to his hidiug-place in the 
wilderness: 

. . . me silva cavusque 
Tutus ab insidiis tenui solabilur ervo ! 

Cowper, in fact, was the first writer to intro- 
duce that intimate union of the home affections 
with the love of country which, in the works of 
Miss Austen and a host of others, was to become 
one of the unique charms and consolations of 
English literature. And the element of austere 
gloom in his character, rarely exposed, but al- 
ways, we know, in the background, is what most 
of all relieves his letters from insipidity. Lamb 
strove deliberately by a kind of crackling mirth 
to drown the sound of the grave inner voice; 
Cowper listened reverently to its admonitions, 
even to its threatenings; he spoke little of what 
he heard, but it tempered his wit and the snug 
comfort of his life with that profounder conscious- 
ness of what, disguise it as we will, lies at the 
bottom of the world's experience. We call him 
mad because he believed himself abandoned of 
God, and shuddered with remorseless conviction. 
Put aside for a moment the language of the 
market place, and be honest with ourselves : is 
there not a little of our fate, of the fate of man- 
kind, in Cowper's desolation? After all, was his 
melancholy radically different from the state of 
that great Frenchman, a lover of his letters withal, 
Sainte-Beuve, who dared not for a day rest from 



20 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

benumbing labour lest the questionings of his own 
heart should make themselves heard, and who 
wrote to a friend that no consolation could reach 
that settled sadness which was rooted in la grande 
absence de Dieu ? 

It is not strange that the society from which 
Cowper fled should have seemed to him whimsical 
and a little mad. "A line of Bourne's," he saj-s, 
* ' is very expressive of the spectacle which this 
world exhibits, tragi-comical as the incidents of 
it are, absurd in themselves, but terrible in their 
consequences : 

Sunt res humaaae flebile ludibrium." 

Nor is it strange that he wondered sometimes at 
the gayet3^ of his own letters: " It is as if Harle- 
quin should intrude himself into the gloomy 
chamber, where a corpse is deposited in state. 
His antic gesticulations would be unseasonable, 
at any rate, but more especially so if they should 
distort the features of the mournful attendants 
into laughter." But it is not the humour of the 
letters that attracts us so much as their picture of 
quiet home delights in the midst of a stormy 
world. We linger most over the account of those 
still evenings by the fireside, while Mrs. Unwin, 
and perhaps their friend Lady Austen, was busy 
with her needles— 

Thy needles, once a shining store, 
For my sake restless heretofore. 
Now rust disused, and shine no more, 

My Mary ! — 



CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER 21 

and while Cowper read aloud from some book of 
travels and mingled his comments with the story 
of the wanderer: 

My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions 
that I seem to partake with the navigators in all the dan- 
gers they encountered. I lose my anchor ; my mainsail 
is rent into shreds ; I kill a shark, and by signs converse 
with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from the 
fireside. 

And here I cannot but regret again that we 
have not an edition of these letters interspersed 
with the passages of The Task, which describe the 
same scenes. I confess that two-thirds at least 
of that poem is indeed a task to-day. The long 
tirades against vice, and the equally long preach- 
ing of virtue, all in blank verse, lack, to my ear, 
the vivacity and the sustaining power of the 
earlier rhymed poems, such as Hope (that superb 
moralising on the poet's own life) and Retirement, 
to name the best of the series. But the fourth 
book of The Task, and, indeed, all the exquisite 
genre pictures of the poem : 

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, 
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, 
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn 
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups 
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, 
So let us welcome peaceful evening in — 

all this intimate correspondence with the world 
in verse is not only interesting in itself, but gains 



22 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

a double cliarm by association with tlie letters. 
" We were just sitting down to supper," writes 
Cowper to Mrs. Unwin's son, " when a hasty rap 
alarmed us. I ran to the hall window, for the 
hares being loose, it was impossible to open the 
door." It is fortunate for the reader if his 
memory at these words calls up those lines of 
The Task : 

Oue sheltered hare 
Has never heard the sauguinary yell 
Of cruel man, exulting in her woes. 
Innocent partner of my peaceful home, 
Whom ten long years' experience of my care 
Has made at last familiar ; she has lost 
Much of her vigilant instinctive dread, 
Not needful here beneath a roof like mine. 
Yes — thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand 
That feeds thee; thou mayst frolic on the floor 
At evening, and at night retire secure 
To thy straw couch, and slumber unalarmed ; 
For I have gained thy confidence, have pledged 
All that is human in me, to protect 
Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love. 
If I survive thee, I will dig thy grave ; 
And when I place thee in it, sighing say, 
I knew at least one hare that had a friend. 

How much of the letters could be illustrated in 
this way — the walks about Olney, the gardening, 
the greenhouse, the lamentations over the Ameri- 
can Rebellion, the tirades against fickle fashions, 
and a thousand other matters that go to make 
up their quiet yet variegated substance. For it 



CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER 23 

must not be supposed that Cowper, in these Olney 
days at least, was ever dull. I will quote the 
opening paragraph of one other letter — to his 
friend the Rev. William Bull, great preacher 
of Newport Pagnell, and, alas ! great smoker,' 
" smoke-inhaling Bull," " Dear Taureau " — as a 
change from the more serious theme, and then 
pass on: 

Mon aimable et tr^s cher Ami— li is not in the power 
of chaises or chariots to carry you where my affections 
will not follow you ; if I heard that you were gone to 
finish your days in the Moon, I should not love you the 

■ How refreshing is that whiff of good honest smoke in 
the abstemious lives of Cowper and John Newton ! I 
have just seen, in W. Tuckwell's Reminiscences of a 
Radical Parson, a happy allusion to William Bull's pipes: 
" To Oluey, under the auspices of a benevolent Quaker. 
. . . I saw all the relics : the parlour where bewitch- 
ing Lady Austen's shuttlecock flew to and fro ; the hole 
made in the wall for the entrance and exit of the hares ; 
the poet's bedroom ; Mrs. Unwin's room, where, as she 
knelt by the bed in prayer, her clothes caught fire. The 
garden was in other hands, but I obtained leave to enter 
it. Of course, I went straight to the summer-house, 
small, and with not much glass, the wall and ceiling cov- 
ered with names, Cowper's wig-block on the table, a hole 
in the floor where that mellow divine, the Reverend Mr. 
Bull, kept his pipes ; outside, the bed of pinks celebrated 
affectionately in one of his letters to Joseph Hill, pipings 
from which are still growing in my garden." — The date 
of the Rev. Mr. Tuckwell's visit to Olney is not indicated, 
but his Reminiscences were published in the present year, 
1905. 



24 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

less ; but should contemplate the place of your abode, as 
often as it appeared in the heavens, and say — Farewell, 
my friend, forever ! Lost, but not forgotten ! Live 
happy in thy lantern, and smoke the remainder of thy 
pipes in peace ! Thou art rid of Earth, at least of all its 
cares, and so far can I rejoice in thy removal. 

Might not that have been written by Lamb to one 
of his cronies — by a Lamb still of the eighteenth 
centurj^ ? 

But the Olney days must come to a close. After 
nineteen years of rCvSidence there Cowper and his 
companion (was ever love like theirs, that was yet 
not love!) were induced to move to Weston Lodge, 
a more convenient house in the village of Weston 
Underwood, not far away. Somehow, with the 
change, the letters lose the freshness of their 
peculiar interest. We shall never again find him 
writing of his home as he had written before of 
Olney : 

The world is before me ; I am not shut up in the Bas- 
tille ; there are no moats about my castle, no locks upon 
my gates o/ which I have not the key ; but an invisible, 
uncontrollable agenc}^, a local attachment, an inclination 
more forcible than I ever felt, even to the place of my 
birth, serves me for prison-walls, and for bounds which I 
cannot pass. . . . The very stones in the garden- 
walls are my intimate acquaintance. I should miss 
almost the minutest object, and be disagreeably affected 
by its removal, and am persuaded that, were it possible I 
could leave this incommodious nook for a twelvemonth, 
I should return to it again with rapture, and be trans- 
ported w ith the sight of objects which to all the world 



CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER 2$ 

beside would be at least indiflFerent ; some of them per- 
haps, such as the ragged thatch and the tottering walls 
of the neighbouring cottages, disgusting. But so it is, 
and it is so, because here is to be my abode, and because 
such is the appointment of Him that placed me in it. 

Often while reading the letters from Weston one 
wishes he had never turned the key in the lock 
of that beloved enclosure. Fame had come to 
him now. His correspondence is distributed 
among more people; he is neither quite of the 
world, nor of the cloister. Above all, he is busy 
— endlessly, wearisomely busy — with his trans- 
lation of Homer. I have often wondered what 
the result would have been had his good friends 
and neighbours the Throckmortons converted him 
from his rigid Calvinism to their own milder 
Catholic faith, and set him in spiritual comfort to 
writing another Task. Idle conjecture! For the 
rest of his life he toiled resolutely at a translation 
which the world did not want and which brought 
its own tedium into his letters. And then comes 
the pitiful collapse of Mrs. Unwin, broken at last 
by the long vigil over her sick companion: 

The twentieth year is well-nigh past, 
Since first our sky was overcast ; 
Ah would that this might be the last ! 
My Mary 1 

Thy spirits have a fainter flow, 
I see thee daily weaker grow — 
'T was my distress that brought thee low, 
My Mary ! 



26 SHELBRUNE ESSAYS 

The end is tragic, terrible. In 1794 Cowper 
sank into a state of melancholia, in which for 
hours he would walk backward and forward in 
his study hke a caged tiger. Mrs. Unwin was 
dying. At last a cousin, the Rev. John Johnson, 
took charge of the invalids and carried them away 
into Norfolk. The last few letters, written in 
Cowper's ever-dwindling moments of sanity, are 
without a parallel in English. The contrast of 
the wild images with the stately and restrained 
language leaves an impression of awe, almost of 
fear, on the mind. " My thoughts," he writes to 
Lady Hesketh, "are like loose and dry sand, 
which the closer it is grasped slips the sooner 
away"; and again to the same faithful friend 
from Mundesley on the coast: 

The cliflF is here of a height that it is terrible to look 
down from ; and yesterday evening, by moonlight, I 
passed sometimes within a foot of the edge of it, from 
which to have fallen would probably have been to be 
dashed in pieces. But though to have been dashed in 
pieces would perhaps have been best for me, I shrunk 
from the precipice, and am waiting to be dashed in pieces 
by other means. At two miles distance on the coast is a 
solitary pillar of rock, that the crumbling cliff has left at 
the high-water mark. I have visited it twice, and have 
found it an emblem of myself. Torn from my natural 
connections, I stand alone and expect the storm that 
shall displace me. 

There is in this that sheer physical horror which 
it is not good to write or to read. Somewhere in 



CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER 2/ 

his earlier letters lie quotes the well-known line 
of Horace: " We and all ours are but a debt to 
death. ' ' How the commonplace words come back 
with frightfully intensified meaning as we read 
this story of decay! It is not good, I say, to see 
the nakedness of human fate so ruthlessly re- 
vealed. The mind reverts instinctively from this 
scene to the homely life at Olney. Might it not 
be that if Cowper had remained in that spot 
where the very stones of the garden walls were 
endeared to him, if he had never been torn from 
his natural connections — might it not be that he 
would have passed from the world in the end 
saddened but not frenzied by his dreams? At 
least in our thoughts let us leave him, not stand- 
ing alone on the crumbling cliff over a hungry 
sea. but walking with his sympathetic companion 
arm in arm in the peaceful valley of the Ouse. 



WHITTIER THE POET 

Last month we took the new edition of 
Cowper's Letters as an occasion to consider the 
life of the poet, who brought the quiet affections 
of the home into English literature, and that may 
be our excuse for waiving the immediate pressure 
of the book-market and turning to the American 
poet whose inspiration springs largely from the 
same source. Different as the two writers are in 
so many respects, different above all in their edu- 
cation and surroundings, yet it would not be diffi- 
cult to find points of resemblance to justify such a 
sequence. In both the spirit of religion was 
bound up with the cult of seclusion; to both the 
home was a refuge from the world; to both this 
comfort was sweetened by the care of a beloved 
companion, though neither of them ever married. 
But, after all, no apology is needed, I trust, for 
writing about a poet who is very dear to me as to 
many others, and who has suffered more than 
most at the hands of his biographers and critics. 

It should seem that no one could go through 
Whittier's poems even casually without remark- 
ing the peculiar beauty of the idyl called The 
Peymsylvania Pilgrim. It is one of the longest 
and, all things considered, quite the most char- 

28 



WHITTIER 29 

acteristic of his works. Yet Mr. Pickard in his 
oflScial biography brings the poem into no rehef ; 
Professor Carpenter names it in passing without 
a word of comment; and Colonel Higginson in 
his volume in the English Men of Letters Series 
does not mention it at all — but then he has a habit 
of omitting the essential. Among those who have 
written criticallj'- of American literature the poem 
is not even named, so far as I am aware, by Mr. 
Stedman or by Professors Richardson, L,awton, 
Wendell, and Trent. I confess that this con- 
spiracy of silence, as I hunted through one his- 
torian and critic after another, grew disconcerting, 
and I began to distrust my own judgment until I 
chanced upon a confirmation in two passages of 
Whittier's letters. Writing of The Pennsylvania 
Pilgrim to his publisher in May, 1872, he said: 
" I think honestly it is as good as (if not better 
than) any long poem I have written' ' ; and a little 
later to Ceha Thaxter: "It is as long as Snow- 
Boiind, and better, but nobody will find it out." 
One suspects that all these gentlemen in treating 
of Whittier have merely followed the line of least 
resistance, without taking much care to form an 
independent opinion; and the line of least resist- 
ance has a miserable trick of leading us astray. 
In the first place, Whittier's share in the Abolition 
and other reforming movements bulks so large in 
the historians' eyes that sometimes they seem 
almost to forget Whittier the poet. And the 
critics have taken the same cue. "Whittier," 



30 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

says one of them, " will be remembered even more 
as the trumpet- voice of Emancipation than as the 
peaceful singer of rural New England." 

The error, if it may be said with reverence, can 
be traced even higher, and in Whittier we meet 
only one more witness to the unconcern of Nature 
over the marring of her finer products. The 
wonder is not that he turned out so much that is 
faulty, but that now and then he attained such 
exquisite grace. Whittier was born, December 17, 
1807, in East Haverhill, in the old homestead 
which still stands, a museum now, hidden among 
the hills from anj^ other human habitation. It is 
a country not without quiet charm, though the 
familiar lines of Snow-Bound make us think of it 
first as beaten \iy storm and locked in by frost. 
And, notwithstanding the solace of an affectionate 
home, life on the farm was unnecessarily hard. 
The habits of the grim pioneers had persisted and 
weighed heavily on their dwindled descendants. 
Thus the Whittiers, who used to drive regularly 
to the Quaker meeting at Amesbury, eight miles 
distant, are said to have taken no pains to protect 
themselves from the bleakest weather. The poet 
suffered in body all his life from the rigour of this 
discipline; nor did he suffer less from insufficiency 
of mental training. Not only was the family 
poor, but it even appears that the sober tradition 
of his people looked askance at the limited means 
of education at hand. Only at the earnest solici- 
tation of outsiders was the boy allowed to attend 



WPIITTIER 31 

the academy at Haverhill. Meanwhile, he was a 
little of everything: farm worker, shoemaker, 
teacher — he seems to have shifted about as chance 
or necessity directed. There were few — he has 
told us how few — books in the house, and little 
time for reading those he could borrow. But if 
he read little, he wrote prodigiously. The story 
of his first printed poem in the Free Press of New- 
buryport and of the encouragement given him by 
the far-sighted editor, William Lloyd Garrison, is 
one of the best known and most picturesque inci- 
dents in American letters. The young poet — he 
was then nineteen — was launched; from that time 
he became an assiduous writer for the press, 
and was at intervals editor of various country or 
propagandist newspapers. 

The great currents of literary tradition reached 
him vaguely from afar and troubled his dreams. 
Burns fell early into his hands, and the ambition 
was soon formed of transferring the braes and 
byres of Scotland to the hills and folds of New 
England. The rhythms of Thomas Moore rang 
seductively in his ears. Byron, too, by a spirit 
of contrast, appealed to the Quaker lad, and one 
may read in Mr. Pickard's capital little book, 
Whittier-Land, verses and fragments of letters 
which show how deeply that poison of the age 
had bitten into his heart. But the influence of 
those sons of fire was more than counteracted by 
the gentle spirit of Mrs. Hemans — indeed, the 
worst to be said of Whittier is that never, to the 



32 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

day of his death, did he quite throw oflf allegiance 
to the facile and innocent muse of that lad3^ It 
is only right to add that in his later years, es- 
pecially in the calm that followed the civil war, 
he became a pretty widely read man, a man of far 
more culture than he is commonly supposed to 
have been. 

Such was the boy, then — thirsting for fame, 
scantily educated, totally without critical guidance 
or environment, looking this way and that — who 
was thrust under the two dominant influences of 
his time and place. To one of these, transcen- 
dentalism, we owe nearly all that is highest, and 
unfortunately much also that is most inchoate, in 
New England literature. Its spirit of complacent 
self-dependence was dangerous at the best, al- 
though in Whittier I cannot see that it did more 
than confirm his habit of uncritical prolixity; it 
could offer no spiritual seduction to one who held 
liberally the easy doctrine of the Friends. But to 
the other influence he fell a natural prey. The 
whole tradition of the Quakers — the memory of 
Pastorius, whom he was to sing as the Pennsyl- 
vania Pilgrim; the inheritance of saintly John 
Woolman, whose Journal he was to edit — pre- 
pared him to take part in the great battle of the 
Abolitionists. From that memorable hour when 
he met Garrison face to face on his Haverhill 
farm to the ending of the war in 1865, he was no 
longer free to develop intellectually, but was a 
servant of reform and politics. I am not, of 



WHITTIER 33 

course, criticising that movement or its achieve- 
ment; I regret only that one whose temper and 
genius called for fostering in quiet fields should 
have been dragged into that stormy arena. As 
he says in lines that are true if not elegant: 

Hater of din and riot, 
He lived in days unquiet ; 
And, lover of all beauty. 
Trod the hard ways of duty. 

It is not merely that political interests absorbed 
the energy which would otherwise have gone to 
letters ; the knowledge of life acquired might have 
compensated and more than compensated for less 
writing, and, indeed, he wrote too much as it was. 
The difficulty is rather that "the pledged philan- 
thropy of earth" somehow militates against art, 
as Whittier himself felt. Not only the poems 
actually written to forward the propaganda are 
for the most part dismal reading, but something 
of their tone has crept into other poems, with an 
effect to-day not far from cant. Twice the cry of 
the liberator in Whittier rose to noble writing. 
But in both cases it is not the mere pleading of 
reform but a very human and personal indigna- 
tion that speaks. In Massachusetts to Virginia 
this feeling of outrage calls forth one of the most 
stirring pieces of personification ever written, nor 
can I imagine a day when a man of Massachusetts 
shall be able to read it without a tingling of the 
blood, or a Virginian born hear it without a sense 

VOL. III. — 3. 



34 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

of unacknowledged shame; in Ichabod he uttered 
a word of individual scorn that will rise up for 
quotation whenever any strong leader misuses, 
or is thought to misuse, his powers. Every one 
knows the lines in which Webster is pilloried for 
his defection: 

Of all we loved and hououred, naught 

Save power remains ; 
A fallen angel's pride of thought, 

Still strong in chains. 

All else is gone ; from those great eyes 

The soul has fled ; 
When faith is lost, when honour dies, 

The man is dead ! 

Then pay the reverence of old days 

To his dead fame ; 
Walk backward, with averted gaze, 

And hide the shame ! 

It is instructive that only when his note is thus 
pierced by individual emotion does the reformer 
attain to universality of appeal. Unfortunately 
most of Whittier's slave songs sink down to a 
dreary level — down to the almost humorous bathos 
of the lines suggested by Uncle Tom' s Cabin : 

Dry the tears for holy Eva, 

With the blessed angels leave her. . . . 

What he needed above everything else, what 
bis surroundings were least of all able to give 



WHITTIER 3S 

him, was a canon of taste, which would have 
driven him to stiflFen his work, to purge away the 
flaccid and set the genuinely poetical in stronger 
relief — a purely literary canon which would have 
offset the moralist and reformer in him, and made 
it impossible for him (and his essays show that the 
critical vein was not absent by nature) to write 
of Longfellow's Psabn of Life: "These nine 
simple verses are worth more than all the dreams 
of Shelley, and Keats, and Wordsworth. They 
are alive and vigorous with the spirit of the day 
in which we live — the moral steam enginery of an 
age of action." While Tennyson and Matthew 
Arnold were writing in England, the earlier tra- 
dition had not entirely died out in America that 
the first proof of genius is an abandonment of 
one's mind to temperament and "inspiration." 
Byron had written verse as vacillating and form- 
less as any of Whittier's ; Shelley had poured 
forth page after page of effusivevapourings ; Keats 
learned the lesson of self-restraint almost too late; 
Wordsworth indulged in platitudes as simpering 
as " holy Eva "; but none of these poets suffered 
so deplorably from the lack of criticism as the 
finest of our New England spirits. The very 
magnificence of their rebellion, the depth and 
originality of their emotion, were a compensation 
for their licence, were perhaps inevitably involved 
in it. The humbler theme of Whittier' s muse can 
offer no such apology; he who sings the common- 
place joys and cares of the heart needs above all 



36 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

to attain that simplex munditiis which is the last 
refinement of taste; lacking that, he becomes him- 
self commonplace. And Whittier knew this. In 
the Proem to the first general collection of his 
poems, he wrote: 

Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace, 
No rounded art the lack supplies ; 

Unskilled the subtle line to trace, 

Or softer shades of Nature's face, 
I view her common forms with unanointed eyes. 

Nor mine the seer-like power to show 

The secrets of the heart and mind ; 
To drop the plummet line below 
Our common world of joy and woe, 

A more intense despair or brighter hope to find. 

But at this point we must part company with 
his confession. His reward is not that he showed 
" a hate of tyranny intense" or laid his gifts on 
the shrine of Freedom, but that more completely 
than any other poet he developed the peculiarly 
English ideal of the home which Cowper first 
brought intimately into letters, and added to it 
those homely comforts of the spirit which Cowper 
never felt. With Longfellow he was destined to 
throw the glamour of the imagination over "our 
common world of joy and woe." 

Perhaps something in his American surround- 
ings fitted him peculiarly for this humbler role. 
The fact that the men who had made the new 
colony belonged to the middle class of society 



WHITTIER 37 

tended to raise the idea of home into undisputed 
honour, and the isolation and perils of their situa- 
tion in the earlier years had enhanced this feeling 
into something akin to a cult. America is still 
the land of homes. That may be a lowly theme 
for a poet; to admire such poetry may, indeed it 
does, seem to many to smack of a bourgeois taste. 
And yet there is an implication here that carries 
a grave injustice. For myself, I admit that 
Whittier is one of the authors of my choice, and 
that I read him with ever fresh delight; I even 
think there must be something spurious in that 
man's culture whose appreciation of Milton or 
Shelley dulls his ear to the paler but very refined 
charm of Whittier. If truth be told, there is 
sometimes a kind of exquisite content in turning 
from the pretentious poets who exact so much of 
the reader to the more immediate appeal of our 
sweet Quaker. In comparison with those more 
exalted muses his nymph is like the nut-brown 
lass of the old song — 

But when we come where comfort is, 
She never will say No. 

And often, after fatiguing the brain with the 
searchings and inquisitive flight of the Masters, 
we are ready to say with Whittier: 

I break my pilgrim staff, I lay 

Aside the toiling oar ; 
The angel sought so far away 

I welcome at uiy door. 



38 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

There, to me at least, and not in the ballads 
which are more generally praised, lies the rare 
excellence of Whittier. True enough, some of 
these narrative poems are spirited and admirably- 
composed. Now and then, as in Cassaiidra 
Southwick, they strike a note which reminds one 
singularly of the real ballads of the people; in 
fact, it would not be fanciful to discover a certain 
resemblance between the manner of their pro- 
duction and of the old popular songs. Their 
publication in obscure newspapers, from which 
they were copied and gradually sent the rounds 
of the country, is not essentially different from 
the way in which many of the ballads were 
probably spread abroad. The very atmosphere 
that surrounded the boy in a land where the 
traditions of border warfare and miraculous 
events still ran from mouth to mouth prepared 
him for such balladry. Take, for example, this 
account of his youth from the Introduction to 
Snow-Bound : 



Under such circumstances story-telling was a necessary 
resource in the long winter evenings. My father when a 
young man had traversed the wilderness to Canada, and 
could tell us of his adventures with Indians and wild 
beasts, and of his sojourn in the French villages. My 
uncle was ready with his record of hunting and fishing, 
and, it must be confessed, with stories, which he at least 
half-believed, of witchcraft and apparitions. My mother, 
who was born in the Indian-haunted region of Soniers- 
worth, New Hampshire, between Dover and Portsmouth, 



WHITTIER 39 

told us of the inroads of the savages, and the narrow 
escape of her ancestors. 

No doubt this legendary training helped to 
give more life to Whittier's ballads and border 
tales than ordinarily enters into that rather facti- 
tious form of composition; and for a while he 
made a deliberate attempt to create out of it a 
native literature. But the effect was still deeper, 
by a kind of contrast, on his poetry of the home. 
After several incursions into the world as editor 
and agitator, he was compelled by ill health to 
settle down finally in the Amesbury house, which 
he had bought in 1836; and there with little in- 
terruption he lived from his thirty-third to his 
eighty-fifth year, the year of his death. In Snow- 
Bound his memory called up a picture of the old 
Haverhill homestead, unsurpassed in its kind for 
sincerity and picttiresqueuess; in poem after poem 
he celebrated directly or indirectly " the river 
hemmed with leaning trees," the hills and ponds, 
the very roads and bridges of the land about these 
sheltered towns. On the one hand, the recollec- 
tion of the wilder life through which his parents 
had come added to the snugness and intimacy of 
these peaceful scenes, and, on the other hand, the 
encroachment of trade and factories into their 
midst lent a poignancy of regret for a grace that 
was passing away. Mr. Pickard's little guide- 
book, to which I have already referred, brings 
together happily the innumerable allusions of 
local interest; there is no spot in America, not 



40 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

even Concord, where the Hght of fancy lies so 
entrancingly: 

A tender glow, exceeding fair, 
A dream of day without its glare. 

For it must be seen that the crudeness of 
Whittier's education, and the thorny ways into 
which he was drawn, marred a large part, but by 
no means all, of his work. There are a few 
poems in his collection of an admirable crafts- 
manship in that genre which is none the less 
difficult — which I sometimes think is almost more 
difficult — because it lies so perilously near the 
trivial and mean. There are others which need 
only a little pruning, perhaps a little heightening 
here and there, to approach the same perfection 
of charm. Especially they have that harmony 
of tone which arises from the unspoiled sincerity of 
the writer and ends by subduing the reader to a 
restful sympathy with their mood. No one can 
read much in Whittier without feeling that these 
hills and valleys about the Merrimac have become 
one of the inalienable domiciles of the spirit — a 
familiar place where the imagination dwells with 
untroubled delight. Even the little things, the 
flowers and birds of the country, are made to con- 
tribute to the sense of homely content. There is 
one poem in particular which has always seemed 
to me significant of Whittier's manner, and a 
comparison of it with the famous flower poems 
of Wordsworth will show the difierence between 



WHITTIER 41 

what I call the poetry of the hearth and the poetry 
of intimate nature. It was written to celebrate a 
gift of Pressed Gentian that hung at the poet's 
window, presenting to wayside travellers only a 
' * grey disk of clouded glass ' ' : 

They cannot from their outlook see 

The perfect grace it hath for me ; 

For there the flower, whose fringes through 

The frosty breath of autumn blew, 

Turns from without its face of bloom 

To the warm tropic of my room, 

As fair as when beside its brook 

The hue of bending skies it took. 

So from the trodden ways of earth 

Seem some sweet souls who veil their worth, 

And offer to the careless glance 

The clouding grey of circumstance. . . . 

There is not a little of self-portraiture in this image 
of the flower, and it may be that some who have 
written of Whittier patronisingly are like the 
hasty passer-by — they see only the grey disk of 
clouded glass. 

And the emotion that furnishes the loudest 
note to most poets is subdued in Whittier to the 
same gentle tone. To be sure, there is evidence 
enough that his heart in youth was touched al- 
most to a Byronic melancholy, and he himself 
somewhere remarks that " Few guessed beneath 
his aspect grave, What passions strove in chains." 
But was there not a remnant of self-deception 



42 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

here ? Do not the calmest and wisest of us like 
to believe we are calm and wise by virtue of 
vigorous self-repression? Wordsworth, we re- 
member, explained the absence of love from his 
poetry on the ground that his passions were too 
violent to allow any safe expression of them. 
Possibly they were. Certainly, in Whittier's 
verse we have no reflection of those tropic heats, 
but only ' ' the Indian summer of the heart." The 
very title, Memories, of his best-known love poem 
(based on a real experience, the details of which 
have recently been revealed) suggests the mood in 
which he approaches this subject. It is not the 
quest of desire he sings, but the home-coming after 
the frustrate search and the dreaming recollection 
by the hearth of an ancient loss. In the same 
waj', his ballad Maud Midler, which is supposed 
to appeal only to the unsophisticated, is attuned 
to that shamelessly provincial rhyme, 

For of all sad words of tontjue or pen, 

The saddest are these : " It misrht have been ! " 



■o' 



It is a little so with us all, perhaps, as it was 
with the judge and the maiden; only, as we 
learn the lesson of years, the disillusion is likely 
to be mingled strangely with relief, and the 
sadness to take on a most comfortable and flatter- 
ing Quaker drab — as it did with our " hermit of 
Amesbury." 

If love was a memory, religion was for Whittier 
a hope and an ever-present consolation — peculiarly 



WHITTIER 43 

a consolation, because he brought into it the same 
thought of home-coming that marks his treatment 
of nature and the passions. Partly, this was due 
to his inherited creed, which was tolerant enough 
to soften theological dispute: "Quakerism," he 
once wrote to Lucy Larcom, " has no Church of 
its own — it belongs to the Church Universal and 
Invisible." In great part the spirit of his faith 
was private to him; it even called for a note of 
apology to the sterner of his brethren: 

friends ! with wliom my feet have trod 
The quiet aisles of prayer, 

Glad witness to your zeal for God 
k And love of mau I bear. 

1 trace your lines of argument ; 
Your logic linked and strong 

I weigh as one who dreads dissent, 
\ And fears a doubt as wrong. 

But still my human hands are weak 
I To hold your iron creeds : 
Against the words ye bid me speak 
My heart within me pleads, . , , 

And the inimitably tender conclusion: 

And so beside the Silent Sea 

I wait the muffled oar ; 
No harm from Him can come to me 

On ocean or on shore. 

I know not where His islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air ; 



44 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

I only know I cannot drift 
Bej'ond His love and care. 

O brothers ! if my faith is vain, 

If hopes like these betray, 
Pray for me that my feet may gain 

The sure and safer way. 

And Thou, O Lord ! by whom are seen 

Thy creatures as they be, 
Forgive me if too close I lean 

My human heart on Thee ! 

Not a strenuous mood it may be, or very exalted 
— not the mood of the battling saints, but one 
familiar to many a troubled man in his hours of 
simpler trust. We have been led to Whittier 
through the familiar poetry of Cowper; consider 
what it would have been to that tormented soul 
if for one day he could have forgotten the awe of 
his divinity and leaned his human heart on God. 
It is not good for any but the strongest to dwell 
too much with abstractions of the mind. And, 
after all, change the phrasing a little, substitute 
if you choose some other intuitive belief for the 
poet's childlike faith, and you will be surprised to 
find how many of the world's philosophers would 
accept the response of Whittier: 

We search the world for truth ; we cull 
The good, the pure, the beautiful. 
From graven stone and written scroll, 
From all old flower-fields of the soul ; 
And, weary seekers of the best. 
We come back laden from our quest, 



WHITTIER 45 

To find that all the sages said 
Is in the Book our mothers read. 

Such a rout of the intellect may seem ignomin- 
ious, but is it any more so than the petulance of 
Renan because all his learning had only brought 
him to the same state of skepticism as that of the 
gamin in the streets of Paris ? Our tether is short 
enough, whichever way we seek escape. It is 
worth noting that in his essay on Baxter (he who 
conceived of the saints' rest in a very different 
spirit) Whittier blames that worthy just for the 
exaltation of his character. " In our view," he 
says, " this was its radical defect. He had too 
little of humanity, he felt too little of the attrac- 
tion of this world, and lived too exclusively in the 
spiritual and the unearthly." 

And if Whittier's faith was simple and human, 
his vision of the other world was strangely like 
the remembrance of a home that we have left in 
youth. There is a striking expression of this in 
one of his prose tales, now almost forgotten de- 
spite their elements of pale but very genuine 
humour and pathos, as if written by an attenu- 
ated Hawthorne. The good physician, Dr. Single- 
tary, and his friends are discussing the future life, 
and says one of them: 

"Have you not felt at times that our ordinary concep- 
tions of heaven itself, derived from the vague hints and 
Oriental imagery of the Scriptures, are sadly inadequate 
to our human wants and hopes? How gladly would we 
forego the golden streets and gates of pearl, the thrones, 



46 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

temples, and harps, for the sunset lights of our native 
valleys; the vvoodpaths, where moss carpets are woven 
with violets and wild flowers; the songs of birds, the low 
of cattle, the hum of bees in the apple-blossoms — the 
sweet, famihar voices of human life and nature ! In the 
place of strange splendours and unknown music, should 
we not welcome rather whatever reminded us of the com- 
mon sights and sounds of our old home ? " 

It was eminently proper that, as the poet lay 
awaiting death, with his kinsfolk gathered about 
him, one of them should have recited the stanzas 
of his psalm At Last : 

When on my day of life the night is falling, 
And, in the winds from unsunned spaces blown, 

I hear far voices out of darkness calling 
My feet to paths unknown, 

Thou who hast made my home of life so pleasant, 
Leave not its tenant when its walls decay ; 

Love Divine, O Helper ever present. 
Be Thou my strength and stay ! 

1 have but Thee, my Father ! let Thy spirit 
Be with me then to comfort and uphold ; 

No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit, 
Nor street of shining gold. 

SufiBce it if — my good and ill unreckoned, 

And both forgiven through Thy abounding grace — 

I find myself by hands familiar beckoned 
Unto my fitting place. 

I would not call this the highest religious 
poetry, pure aud sweet as it may be. Something 



WHITTIER 47 

Still is lacking, but to see that want fulfilled one 
must travel out of Whittier's age, back through 
all the eighteenth century, back into the seven- 
teenth. There 3'ou will find it in Vaughan and 
Herbert and sometimes in Marvell — poets whom 
Whittier read and admired. Take two poems 
from these two ages, place them side by side, and 
the one thing needed fairly strikes the eyes. The 
first poem Whittier wrote after the death of his 
sister Elizabeth (who had been to him what Mrs. 
Unwin had been to Cowper) was The Vayiishers, 
founded on a pretty superstition he had read in 
Schoolcraft: 

Sweetest of all childlike dreams 

In the simple Indian lore 
Still to me the legend seems 

Of the shapes who flit before. 

Flitting, passing, seen, and gone, 
Never reached nor found at rest, 

Baffling search, but beckoning on 
To the Sunset of the Blest. 

From the clefts of mountain rocks, 
Through the dark of lowland firs, 

Flash the eyes and flow the locks 
Of the mystic Vanishers ! 

Now Vaughan, too, wrote a poem on those gone 
from him: 

They are all gone into the world of light, 

And I alone sit lingering here ; 
Their very memory is fair and bright, 
And my sad thoughts doth clear. 



48 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast, 

Like stars upon some gloomy grove, 
Or those faint beams in which this hill is dress'd, 
After the sun's remove. 

I see them walking in an air of glory, 

Whose light doth trample on my days : 
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary, 
Mere glimmering and decays. 

It is not a fair comparison to set one of Whittier'9 
inferior productions beside this superbest hymn 
of an eloquent age; but would any religious poem 
of the nineteenth century, even the best of them, 
fare much better? There is indeed one thing 
lacking, and that is ecstasy. But ecstasy demands 
a different kind of faith from that of Whittier's 
day or ours, and, missing that, I do not see why 
we should begrudge our praise to a genius of pure 
and quiet charm. 

I have already intimated that too complete a 
preoccupation with the reforming and political 
side of Whittier's life has kept the biographers 
from recognising that charm in what he himself 
regarded as his best poem. In 1872, in the full 
maturity of his powers and when the national 
peace had allowed him to indulge the peace in 
his own heart, he wrote his exquisite idyl. The 
Pennsylvania Pilgrim. Perhaps the mere name 
of the poem may suggest another cause why it 
has been overlooked. Whittier has always stood 
pre-eminently as the exponent of New England 
life, and for very natural reasons. And yet it 



WHITTIER 49 

would not be difficult to show from passages in 
bis prose works that bis heart was never quite at 
ease in that Puritan land. The recollection of 
the sufferings which his people had undergone for 
their faith' sake rankled a little in his breast, 
and he was never in perfect sympathy with the 
austerity of New England traditions. We catch 
a tone of relief as he turns in imagination to the 
peace that dwelt " within the land of Penn " : 

Who knows what goadings in their sterner way 
O'er jagged ice, relieved by granite grey, 
Blew round the men of Massachusetts Bay ? 

What hate of heresy the east- wind woke? 
What hints of pitiless power and terror spoke 
In waves that on their iron coast-line broke ? 

It was no doubt during his early residence in 
Philadelphia that he learned the story of the good 
Pastorius, who, in 1683, left the fatherland and 
the society of the mystics he loved to lead a colony 
of Friends to Germantown. The Pilgrim's life in 
that bountiful valley between the Schuylkill and 
the Delaware — 

Where, forest-walled, the scattered hamlets lay 
Along the wedded rivers — 

offered to Whittier a subject admirably adapted 
to his powers. Here the faults of taste that else- 
where so often offend us are sunk in the harmony 
of the whole and in the singular unity of impres- 
sion; and the lack of elevation that so often stints 

VOL. III. — 4. 



50 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

our praise becomes a suave and mellow beauty. 
All the better elements of his genius are displayed 
here in opulent freedom. The affections of the 
heart unfold in unembittered serenity. The sense 
of home seclusion is heightened by the presence 
of the enveloping wilderness, but not disturbed 
by any harsher contrast. Within is familiar joy 
and retirement unassailed — not without a touch 
of humour, as when in the evening, " while his 
wife put on her look of love's endurance," Pas- 
torius took down his tremendous manuscript — 

And read, in half tbe languages of man, 
His Rusca Apiiini, which with bees began, 
And through the gamut of creation ran. 

(The manuscript still exists; pray heaven it be 
never published!) Now and then the winter 
evenings were broken by the coming of some wel- 
come guest — some traveller from the Old World 
bringing news of fair Von Merlau and the other 
beloved mystics; some magistrate from the young 
city, 

Lovely even then 
"With its fair women and its stately men 
Gracing the forest court of William Penn ; 

or some neighbour of the country, the learned 
Swedish pastor who, like Pastorius, "could baffle 
Babel's lingual curse," 

Or painful Kelpius, from his forest den 
By Wissahickou, maddest of good men. 



WHITTIER 51 

Such was the hfe within, and out of doors were 
the labours of the gardener and botanist, while 

the seasons went 
Their rounds, and somewhat to his spirit lent 
Of their own calm and measureless content. 



The scene calls forth some of Whittier's most 
perfect lines of description. Could anything be 
more harmonious than this, with its economy of 
simple grace, 

Slow, overhead, the dusky night-birds sailed? 

No poem would be thoroughly charcteristic of 
Whittier without some echo of the slavery dispute, 
and our first introduction to Pastorius is, indeed, 
as to a baffled forerunner of John Woolman. But 
the question here takes on its most human and 
least political form; it lets in just enough of the 
outside world of action to save the idyl from un- 
reality. Nor could religion well be absent ; rather, 
the whole poem may be called an illustration 
through the Pilgrim's life of that Inner Guide, 
speaking to him not with loud and controversial 
tones, as it spoke to George Fox, but with the 
still, small voice of comfortable persuasion: 

A Voice spake in his ear, 
And lo ! all other voices far and near 
Died at that whisper, full of meanings clear. 



52 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

The Light of Life shone round him ; one by one 
The wandering lights, that all misleading run, 
Went out like candles paling in the sun. 

The account of the grave Friends, unsummoned 
by bells, walking meeting-ward, and of the 
gathered stillness of the room into which only 
the songs of the birds penetrated from without, 
is one of the happiest passages of the poem. How 
dear those hours of common worship were to 
Whittier may be understood from another poem, 
addressed to a visitor who asked him why he did 
not seek rather the grander temple of nature: 

But nature is not solitude ; 

She crowds us with her thronging wood ; 

Her many hands reach out to us, 

Her many tongues are garrulous ; 

Perpetual riddles of surprise 

She offers to our ears and eyes. 

• • • • • • mi 

And so I find it well to come 

For deeper rest to this still room, 

For here the habit of the soul 

Feels less the outer world's control ; 

The strength of mutual purpose pleads 

More earnestly our common needs ; 

And from the silence multiplied 

By these still forms on every side. 

The world that time and sense have knowtl 

Falls off and leaves us God alone. 

For the dinner given to Whittier on his sev^en- 
tieth birthday L,ongfellow wrote a sonnet on The 



WHITTIER 53 

Three Silences of Jlfolifios— the silence of speech, 
of desire, and of thought, through which are 
heard " mysterious sounds from realms beyond 
our reach." Perhaps only one who at some time 
in his life has caught, or seemed to catch, those 
voices and melodies is quite able to appreciate the 
charm of Whittier through the absence of so 
much that calls to us in other poets. 



THK CENTENARY OF SAINTE-BEUVK 

It is a hundred j^ears since Sainte-Beuve was 
born in the Norman city that looks over toward 
England, and more than a generation has passed 
since his death just before the war with Germany.' 
Yesterday three countries — France, Belgium, and 
Switzerland — were celebrating his centenary with 
speeches and essays and dinners, and the singing 
of hymns. At Lausanne, where he had given his 
lectures on Port-Royal, and had undergone not a 
little chagrin for his pains, the University unveiled 
a bronze medallion of his head, — a Sainte-Beuve 
disillusioned and complex, writes a Parisian jour- 
nalist, with immoderate forehead radiating a cold 
serenity, while the lips are contracted into a smile 
at once voluptuous and sarcastic, as it were an 
Erasmus grown fat, with a reminiscence of Baude- 
laire in the ironic mask of the face. It is evidently 
the " Pere Beuve" as we know him in the por- 
traits, and it is not hard to imagine the lips curl- 
ing a little more sardonically at the thought of 
the change that has come since he was a poverty- 

' Charles Augustiu Sainte-Beuve was born at Boulogne- 
sur-Mer, December 23, 1804, and died at Paris, October 
13, 1869. 

54 



SAINTE-BEUVE 55 

Stricken hack and his foibles were the ridicule of 
Paris. 

Yet through all these honours I cannot help 
observing a strain of reluctance, as so often hap- 
pens with a critic who has made himself feared by 
the rectitude of his judgments. There has, for 
one thing, been a good deal of rather foolish 
scandal- mongering and raking up of old anec- 
dotes about his gross habits. Well, Sainte-Beuve 
was sensual. " Je suis du peuple aiusi que mes 
amours," he was wont to hum over his work; and 
when that work was finished, his secretary tells 
us how he used to draw a hat down over his face 
(that face do7it le front demesurement haut 7'ayonne 
de sirenitefroide), and go out on the street for any- 
chance liaison. There is something too much of 
these stories in what is written of Sainte-Beuve 
to-day; and in the estimate of his intellectual 
career too little emphasis is laid on what was 
stable in his opinions, and too much emphasis on 
the changes of his religious and literary creed. 
To be sure, these mutations of belief are com- 
monly cited as his preparation for the art of critic, 
and in a certain sense this is right. But even 
then, if by critic is meant one who merely decides 
the value of this or that book, the essential word 
is left unsaid. He was a critic, and something 
more ; he was, if any man may claim such a title, 
the maitre tmiversel of the century, as, indeed, he 
has been called. 

And the time of his life contributed as much to 



56 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

this position of Doctor Universalis as did his own 
inteUigence. France, during those years from the 
Revolution of 1830 to the fall of the Second Em- 
pire, was the seething-pot of modern ideas, and 
the impression left by the history of the period is 
not unlike that of watching the witch scenes in 
Macbeth. The eighteenth century had been ear- 
nest, mad in part, but its intention was com- 
paratively single, — to tear down the fabric of 
authority, whether political or religious, and 
allow human nature, which was fundamentally 
good, though depraved by custom, to assert itself. 
And human nature did assert itself pretty vigor- 
ously in the French Revolution, proving, one 
might suppose, if it proved anything, that its 
foundation, like its origin, is with the beasts. To 
the men who came afterward that tremendous 
event stood like a great prism between themselves 
and the preceding age; the pillar of light toward 
which they looked for guidance was distorted by 
it and shattered into a thousand coloured rays. 
For many of them, as for Sainte-Beuve, it meant 
that the old humanitarian passion remained side 
by side with a profound distrust of the popular 
heart; for all, the path of reform took the direction 
of some individual caprice or ideal. There were 
democrats and monarchists and imperialists; there 
was the rigid Catholic reaction led by Bonald and 
de Maistre, and the liberal Catholicism of Lamen- 
nais; there was the socialism of Saiut-Simon, 
mixed with notions of a religious hierarchy, and 



SAINTE-BEUVE 57 

other schemes of socialism innumerable ; while 
skepticism took every form of condescension or 
antagonism. Literature also had its serious mis- 
sion, and the battle of the romanticists shook 
Paris almost as violently as a political revolution. 
Through it all science was marching with steady 
gaze, waiting for the hour when it should lay its 
cold hand on the heart of society. 

And with all these movements Sainte-Beuve 
was more or less intimately concerned. As a boy 
he brought with him to Paris the pietistic senti- 
ments of his mother and an aunt on whom, his 
father being dead, his training had devolved. 
Upon these sentiments he soon imposed the phi- 
losophy of the eighteenth century, followed by a 
close study of the Revolution. It is noteworthy 
that his first journalistic work on the Globe was 
a literary description of the places in Greece to 
which the war for independence was calling atten- 
tion, and the reviewing of various memoirs of the 
French Revolution. From these influences he 
passed to the ceyiacle of Victor Hugo, and became 
one of the champions of the new romantic school. 
Meanwhile literature was mingled with romance 
of another sort, and the story of the critic's friend- 
ship for the haughty poet and of his love for the 
poet's wife is of a kind almost incomprehensible 
to the Anglo-Saxon mind. It may be said in 
passing that the letters of Sainte-Beuve to M. and 
Mrae. Hugo, which have only to-day been re- 
covered and published in the Revue de Paris, 



58 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

throw rather a new light on this whole affair. 
The}^ do not exculpate Sainte-Beuve, but the}- at 
least free him from ridicule. His successful pas- 
sion for Mme. Hugo, with its abrupt close when 
Mme. Hugo's daughter came to her first confes- 
sion, and his tormented courtship of Mme. d'Ar- 
bouville in later years, were the chief elements in 
that education sentintetitale which made him so 
cunning in the secrets of the feminine breast. 

But this is a digression. Personal and critical 
causes carried him out of the camp of Victor Hugo 
into the ranks of the Saint-Simonians, whom he 
followed for a while with a kind of half-detached 
enthusiasm. Probably he was less attracted by 
the hopes of a mystically regenerated society, with 
Eufautin as its supreme pontiff", than by the de- 
sire of finding some rest for the imagination in 
this religion of universal love. At least he per- 
ceived in the new brotherhood a relief from the 
strained individualism of the romantic poets, and 
the same instinct, no doubt, followed him from 
Saint-Simonism into the fold of Lamennais. 
There at last he thought to see united the ideals 
of religion and democracy, and some of the bit- 
terest words he ever wrote were in memory of 
the final defalcation of Lamennais, who, as Sainte- 
Beuve said, saved himself but left his disciples 
stranded in the mire. Meanwhile this particular 
disciple had met new friends in Switzerland, and 
through their aid was brought at a critical moment 
to Lausanne to lecture on Port-Royal. There he 



SAINTE-BEUVE 59 

learned to know and respect Vinet, the Protestant 
theologian and critic, who, with the help of his 
good friends the Oliviers, undertook to convert 
the wily Parisian to Calvinism. Saint-Beuve him- 
self seems to have gone into the discussion quite 
earnestly, but for one who knows the past ex- 
periences of that subtle twister there is something 
almost ludicrous in the wa)' these anxious mis- 
sionaries reported each accession and retrogression 
of his faith. He came back to Paris a confirmed 
and satisfied doubter, willing to sacrifice to the 
goddess Chance as the blind deity of this world, 
convinced of materialism and of the essential base- 
ness of human nature, yet equally convinced that 
within man there rules some ultimate principle of 
genius or individual authority which no rational- 
ism can explain, and above all things determined 
to keep his mind open to whatever currents of 
truth may blow through our murky human atmos- 
phere. He ended where he began, in what may 
be called a subtilised and refined philosophy of 
the eighteenth century, with a strain of melan- 
choly quite peculiar to the baffled experience of 
the nineteenth. His aim henceforth was to apply 
to the study of mankind the analytical precision 
of science, with a scientific method of grouping 
men into spiritual families. 

Much has been made of these varied twistings 
of Sainte-Beuve's, both for his honour and dis- 
honour. Certainly they enabled him to insinuate 
himself into almost every kind of intelligence and 



6o SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

report of each author as if he were writing out a 
phase of his own character; they made him in the 
end the spokesman of that eager and troubled age 
whose ferment is to-day just reaching America. 
France scarcely holds the place of intellectual 
supremacy once universally accorded her, yet to 
her glor)^ be it said that, if we look anywhere for 
a single man who summed up within himself the 
life of the nineteenth century, we instinctively 
turn to that country. And more and more it ap- 
pears that to Sainte-Beuve in particular that 
honour must accrue. His understanding was 
more comprehensive than Taine's or Renan's, 
more subtle than that of the former, more upright 
than that of the latter, more single toward the 
truth and more accurate than that of either. 
He never, as did Taine, allowed a preconceived 
idea to warp his arrangement of facts, nor did he 
ever, at least in his mature years, allow his senti- 
mentality, as did Renan, to take the place of 
judgment. Both the past and the present are re- 
flected in his essays with equal clearness. 

On the other hand, this versatility of experience 
has not seldom been laid to lightness and incon- 
sistency of character. I cannot see that the 
charge holds good, unless it be directed also 
against the whole age through which he passed. 
If any one thing has been made clear by the pub- 
lishing of Sainte-Beuve's letters and by the closer 
investigation of his life, it is that he was in these 
earlier years a sincere seeker after religion, and 



SAINTE-BEUVE 6l 

was only held back at the last moment by some 
invincible impotence of faith from joining himself 
finally with this or that sect. And he was thus 
an image of the times. What else is the meaning 
of all those abortive attempts to amalgamate re- 
ligion with the humanitarianism left over from the 
eighteenth century, but a searching for faith where 
the spiritual eye had been blinded? I should 
suppose that Sainte-Beuve's refusal in the end to 
speak the irrevocable word of adhesion indicated 
rather the clearness of his self-knowledge than 
any lightness of procedure. Nor is his incon- 
sistency, whether religious or literary, quite so 
great as it is sometimes held up to be. The in- 
heritance of the eighteenth century was strong 
upon him, while at the same time he had a crav- 
ing for the inner life of the spirit. Naturally he 
felt a powerful attraction in the preaching of such 
men as Saint-Simon and Lamennais, who boasted 
to combine these two tendencies; but the mum- 
mery of Saint-Simonism and the instability of 
Mennaisianism, when it came to the test, too 
soon exposed the lack of spiritual substance in 
both. With this revelation came a growing dis- 
trust of human nature, caused by the political 
degeneracy of France, and by a kind of revulsion 
he threw himself upon the Jansenism which con- 
tained the spirituality the other creeds missed, 
and which based itself frankly on the total de- 
pravity of mankind. He was too much a child 
of the age to breathe in that thin air, and fell back 



62 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

on all that remained to him,— inquisitive doubt 
and a scientific demand for positive truth. It is 
the history of the century. 

And in literature I find the same inconstancy 
on the surface, while at heart he suffered little 
change. Only here his experience ran counter 
to the times, and most of the opprobrium that has 
been cast on him is due to the fact that he never 
allowed the clamour of popular taste and the 
warmth of his sympathy with present modes to 
drown that inner critical voice of doubt. As a 
standard-bearer of Victor Hugo and the romanti- 
cists he still maintained his reserves, and, on the 
other hand, long after he had turned renegade 
from that camp he still spoke of himself as only 
demi-converti. The proportion changed with his 
development, but from beginning to end he was 
at bottom classical in his love of clarity and self- 
restraint, while intensely interested in the life and 
aspirations of his own day. There is in one of 
the recently published letters to Victor Hugo a 
noteworthy illustration of this steadfastness. It 
was, in fact, the second letter he wrote to the 
poet, and goes back to 1827, the year of Cromwell. 
On the twelfth of February, Hugo read his new 
tragi-comedy aloud, and Sainte-Beuve was evi- 
dently warm in expressions of praise. But in the 
seclusion of his own room the critical instinct re- 
awoke in him, and he wrote the next day a long 
letter to the dramatist, not retracting what he had 
said, but adding certain reservations and insinu- 



SAINTE-BEUVE 63 

ating certain admonitions. " Toutes ces critiques 
rentrent dans une seule que je m'6tais deja permis 
d'adresser a votre talent, I'exces, Tabus de la 
force, et passez-moi le mot, la charge.'" Is not 
the whole of his critical attitude toward the men 
of his age practically contained in this rebuke of 
excess, and over-emphasis, and self-indulgence ? 
And Sainte-Beuve when he wTote the words was 
just twenty-three, was in the first ardour of his 
attachment to the giant — the Cyclops, he seemed 
to Sainte-Beuve later — of the century. 

But after all, it is not the elusive seeker of these 
years that we think of when Sainte-Beuve is 
named, nor the author of those many volumes, — 
the Portraits, the Chateaubriand, even the Port- 
Royal, — but the writer of the incomparableZ^^^zaTz^. 
In 1849 he had returned from I^iege after lecturing 
for a year at the University, and found himself 
abounding in ideas, keen for work, and without 
regular employment. He was asked to contribute 
a critical essay to the Constitutionnel each Mon- 
day, and accepted the offer eagerly. "It is now 
twenty-five years," he said, "since I started in 
this career; it is the third form in which I have 
been brought to give out my impressions and 
literary judgments." These first Causeries con- 
tinued until i860, and are published in fourteen 
solid volumes. There was a brief respite then, 
and in 1861 he began the Nouveaux Lundis, 
which continued in the Moniteiir and the Te77ips 
until his last illness in 1S69, filling thirteen 



64 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

similar volumes. Meanwhile his mother had died, 
leaving him a house in Paris and a small income, 
and in 1865 he had been created a senator by 
Napoleon III. at the instigation of the Princesse 
Mathilde. 

In his earlier years he had been poor and 
anxious, living in a student's room, and toiling 
indefatigably to keep the wolf from the door. At 
the end he was rich, and had command of his 
time, yet the story of his labours while writing 
the latest Limdis is one of the heroic examples of 
literature. " Every Tuesday morning," he once 
wrote to a friend, " I go down to the bottom of a 
pit, not to reascend until Friday evening at some 
unknown hour." Those were the days of prepa- 
ration and plotting. From his friend M. Cheron, 
who was librarian of the Bibliotheque Imperiale, 
came memoirs and histories and manuscripts, — 
whatever might serve him in getting up his sub- 
ject, lyate in the week he wrote a rough draft of 
the essay, commonly about six thousand words 
long, in a hand which no one but himself could 
decipher. This task was ordinarily finished in a 
single day, and the essay was then dictated ofif 
rapidly to a secretary to take down in a fair copy. 
That must have been a strenuous season for the 
copyist, for Sainte-Beuve read at a prodigious rate, 
showing impatience at any delay, and still greater 
impatience at any proposed alteration. Indeed, 
during the whole week of preparation he was 
so absorbed in his theme as to ruffle up at the 



SAINTE-BEUVE 6$ 

slightest opposition. In tlie evening he would 
eat a hearty dinner, and then walk out with his 
secretary to the outer Boulevards, the lyUxem- 
bourg, or the Place Saint-Sulpice, for his diges- 
tion, talking all the while on the coming Lundi 
with intense absorption. And woe to the poor 
companion if he expressed any contradiction, or 
hinted that the subject was trivial, — as indeed it 
often was, until the critic had clothed it with the 
life of his own thought. " In a word," Sainte- 
Beuve would cry out savagely, ' ' you wish to 
hinder me in writing my article. The subject 
has not the honour of your sympathy. Really 
it is too bad. ' ' Whereupon he would turn angrily 
on his heel and stride home. The story explains 
the nature of Sainte-Beuve's criticism. For a 
week he lived with his author; " he belonged 
body and soul to his model! He embraced it, 
espoused it, exalted it!" — with the result that 
some of this enthusiasm is transmitted to the 
reader, and the essays are instinct with life as no 
other critic's work has ever been. The strain of 
living thus passionately in a new subject week 
after week was tremendous, and it is not strange 
that his letters are filled with complaints of fatigue, 
and that his health suffered in spite of his robust 
constitution. Nor was the task ended with the 
dictation late Friday night. Most of Saturday 
and Sunday was given up to proofreading, and 
at this time he invited every suggestion, even 
contradiction, often practically rewriting an essay 

VOL. III.— 5. 



66 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

before it reached the press. Monday he was free, 
and it was on that day occurred the famous Magny 
dinners, when Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, Reuan, the 
Goncourts, and a few other chosen spirits, met and 
talked as only Frenchmen can talk. Every con- 
ceivable subject was passed under the fire of 
criticism; nothing was held sacred. Only one 
day a luckless guest, after faith in religion and 
politics and morals had been laughed away, ven- 
tured to intimate that Homer as a canon of taste 
was merely a superstition like another; where- 
upon such a hubbub arose as threatened to bring 
the dinners to an end at once and for all. The 
story is told in the Journal of the Goncourts, and 
it was one of the brothers, I believe, who made 
the perilous insinuation. Imagine, if you can, a 
party of Englishmen taking Homer, or any other 
question of literary faith, with tragic seriousness. 
Such an incident explains many things; it ex- 
plains why Enghsh Hterature has never been, like 
the French, an integral part of the national Hfe. 

And the integrity of mind displayed in the 
Lundis is as notable as the industry. From the 
beginning Sainte-Beuve had possessed that in- 
quisitive passion for the truth, without which all 
other critical gifts are as brass and tinkling cym- 
bals. Nevertheless, it is evident that he did not 
always in his earher writings find it expedient to 
express his whole thought. He was, for example, 
at one time the recognised herald of the romantic 
revolt, and naturally, while writing about Victor 



SAINTE-BEUVE &y 

Hugo, he did not feel it necessary to make in pub- 
lic such frank reservations as his letters to that 
poet contain. His whole thought is there, per- 
haps, but one has to read between the lines to get 
it. And so it was with the other men and move- 
ments with which he for a while allied himself. 
With the Lundis came a change; he was free of 
all entanglements, and could make the precise 
truth his single aim. No doubt a remnant of per- 
sonal jealousy toward those who had passed him 
in the race of popularity embittered the critical 
reservations which he felt, but which might other- 
wise have been uttered more genially. But quite 
as often this seeming rancour was due to the feel- 
ing that he had hitherto been compelled to sup- 
press his full convictions, to a genuine regret for 
the corrupt ways into which French literature 
was deviating. How nearly the exigencies of a 
hack writer had touched him is shown b}^ a pass- 
age in a letter to the Oliviers written in 1838. 
His Swiss friend was debating whether he should 
try his fortunes in Paris as a contributor to the 
magazines, and had asked for advice. " But 
where to write? what to write?" replied Sainte- 
Beuve; " if one could only choose for himself! 
You must wait on opportunity, and in the long 
run this becomes a transaction in which con- 
science may be saved, but every ideal perishes," 
— dayis laquelle la conscieyiU petd toujours etre 
sauve mats oti tout ideal peril. Just about this time 
he was thinking seriously of migratuag with the 



68 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

Oliviers to this country. It would be curious to 
hear what he might have written from New York 
to one who contemplated coming there as a hack 
writer. As for the loss of ideals, his meaning, if 
it needs any elucidation, may be gathered from a 
well-known passage in one of his books : 

The condition of man ordinarily is no more than a suc- 
cession of servitudes, and the only liberty that remains is 
now and then to effect a change. Labour presses, neces- 
sity commands, circumstances sweep us along : at the 
risk of seeming to contradict ourselves or give ourselves 
the lie, we must go on and for ever recommence ; we 
must accept whatever employments are offered, and even 
though we fill them with all conscientiousness and zeal 
we raise a dust on the way, we obscure the images of the 
past, we soil and mar our own selves. And so it is that 
before the goal of old age is reached, we have passed 
through so many lives that scarcely, as we go back in 
memory, can we tell which was our true life, that for 
which we were made and of which we were worthy, the 
life which we would have chosen. 

Those were the words with which he had closed 
his chapters on Chateaubriand ; yet through all 
his deviations he had borne steadily toward one 
point. In after years he could write without pre- 
sumption to a friend: "If I had a device, it would 
be the true, the triie alone ; and the beautiful and 
the good might come out as best they could." 
There are a number of anecdotes which show how 
precious he held this integrity of mind. The best 
known is the fact that, in the days before he was 
appointed senator, and despite the pressure that 



SAINTE-BEUVE 69 

was brought to bear on liim, he still refused to 
write a review of the Emperor's History of Ccesar . 
Both the sense of disillusion, which was really 
inherent in him from his youth, and the passion 
for truth hindered him in his "creative" work, 
while they increased his powers as a critic. He 
grew up, it must be remembered, in the midst of 
the full romantic tide, and as a writer of verse 
there was really no path of great achievement 
open to him save that of Victor Hugo and Lamar- 
tine and the others of whose glory he was so 
jealous. Whatever may have been the differences 
of those poets, in one respect they were alike: 
they all disregarded the subtle miance wherein 
the truth resides, and based their emotions on 
some grandiose conception, half true and half 
false; nor was this mingling of the false and true 
any less predominant in one of Hugo's political 
odes than in lyamartine's personal and religious 
meditations. Now, the whole bent of Sainte- 
Beuve's intellect was toward the subtle drawing 
of distinctions, and even to-day a reader some- 
what romantically and emotionally inclined re- 
sents the manner in which his scalpel cuts into 
the work of these poets and severs what is morbid 
from what is sound. That is criticism; but it 
may easily be seen that such a habit of mind when 
carried to excess would paralyse the poetic im- 
pulse. The finest poetry, perhaps, is written 
when this discriminating principle works in 
the writer strongly but unconsciously; when a 



70 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

certain critical atmosphere about him controls his 
taste, while not compelling him to dull the edge 
of impulse by too much deliberation. Boileau 
had created such an atmosphere about Moliere 
and Racine ; Sainte-Beuve had attempted, but 
unsuccessfully, to do the same for the poets of the 
romantic renaissance. His failure was due in 
part to a certain lack of impressiveness in his own 
personality, but still more to the notions of indi- 
vidual licence which lay at the verj^ foundation of 
that movement. There is a touch of real pathos 
in his superb tribute to Boileau: 

Let us salute and acknowledge to-day the noble and 
mighty harmony of the grand siicle. Without Boileau, 
and without Louis XIV., who recognised Boileau as his 
Superintendent of Parnassus, what would have hap- 
pened? Would even the most talented have produced 
in the same degree what forms their surest heritage of 
glory ? Racine, I fear, would have made more plays like 
Birenice ; La Fontaine fewer Fables and more Contes ; 
Moliere himself would have run to Scapms^ and might 
not have attained to the austere eminence of Le Misan- 
thrope. In a -word, each of these fair geniuses would 
have abounded in his natural defects. Boileau, that is to 
say, the common sense of the poet-critic authorised and 
confirmed by that of a great king, constrained them and 
kept them, by the respect for his presence, to their better 
and graver tasks. And do you know what, in our days, 
has failed our poets, so strong at their beginning in native 
ability, so filled with promise and happy inspiration? 
There failed them a Boileau and an enlightened monarch, 
the twain supporting and consecrating each other. So it 
is these men of talent, seeing themselves in an age of 



SAINTE-BEUVE 7I 

anarchy and without discipline, have not hesitated to be- 
have accordingly ; they have behaved, to be perfectly 
frank, not like exalted geniuses, or even like men, but 
like schoolboys out of school. We have seen the result. 

Nobler tribute to a great predecessor has not 
often been uttered, and in contrast one remembers 
the outrage that has been poured on Boileau's 
name by the later poets of France and England. 
One recalls the scorn of the young Keats, in those 
days when he took licence upon himself to abuse 
the King's English as only a wilful genius can: 

Ill-fated, impious race ! 
That blasphemed the bright Lyrist face to face, 
And did not know it, — no, they went about, 
Holding a poor decrepit standard out 
Marked with most flimsy mottoes, aud in large 
The name of one Boileau ! 

I am not one to fling abuse on the school of 
Dryden and Pope, yet the eigliteenth century 
may to some minds justify the charge of Keats 
and the romanticists. Certainly the critical re- 
straint of French rules, passing to England at a 
time when the tide of inspiration had run low, in- 
duced a certain aridity of manner. But consider 
for a moment what might have been the result in 
English letters if the court of Elizabeth had har- 
boured a man of authority such as Boileau, or, to 
put it the other way, if the large inspiration of 
those poets and playwrights had not come before 
the critical sense of the land was out of its swad- 
dling clothes. What might it have been for us if 



72 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

a Boileau and an Elizabeth together had taught 
Shakespeare to prune his redundancies, to disen- 
tangle his language at times, to eliminate the 
relics of barbarism in his denouements; if they 
had compelled the lesser dramatists to simplify 
their plots and render their characters conceivable 
moral agents; if they had instructed the sonnet- 
eers in common sense and in the laws of the son- 
net; if the)^ had constrained Spenser to tell a 
story, — consider what this might have meant, not 
only to the writers of that day, but to the tradi- 
tion they formed for those that were to come after. 
We should have had our own classics, and not 
been forced to turn to Athens for our canons of 
taste. There would not have been for our con- 
fusion the miserable contrast between the " cor- 
rectness" of Queen Anne's day and the creative 
genius of Elizabeth's, but the two together would 
have made a literature incomparable for richness 
and judgment. It is not too much to say that the 
absence of such a controlling influence at the 
great expansive moment of England is a loss for 
which nothing can ever entirely compensate in 
our literature. 

Such was the ofl&ce which Sainte-Beuve sought 
to fulfil in the France of his own day. That 
conscious principle of restraint might, he thought, 
when applied to his own poetical work, introduce 
into French literature a style like that of Cowper's 
or Wordsworth's in England; and to a certain 
extent he was successful in this attempt. But in 



SAINTE-BEUVE 73 

the end he found the Democritean maxim too 
strong for him: Exdudit sanos Ilelicone poetas ; 
and, indeed, the difference between the poet and 
the critic may scarcely be better defined than in 
this, that in the former the principle of restraint 
works unconsciously and from without, whereas 
in the latter it proceeds consciously and from 
within. And finding himself debarred from 
Helicon (not by impotence, as some would say, 
but by excess of self-knowledge), he deliberately 
undertook to introduce a little more sanity into 
the notions of his contemporaries. I have shown 
how at the very beginning of his career he took 
upon himself privately such a task with Hugo. 
It might almost be said that the history of his 
intellect is summed up in his growth toward the 
sane and the simple; that, like Goethe, from 
whom so much of his critical method derives, his 
life was a long endeavour to supplant the romantic 
elements of his taste by the classical. What else 
is the meaning of his attack on the excesses of 
Balzac ? or his defence of Erasmus {le droit, je ne 
dis des titdes, mats des neutres), and of all those 
others who sought for themselves a governance 
in the law of proportion? In one of his latest 
volumes he took the occasion of Taine's History 
of English Literature to speak out strongly for the 
admirable qualities of Pope: 

I insist on this because the danger to-day is in the sac- 
rifice of the writers and poets whom I will call the moder- 
ate. For a long time they had all the honours : one 



74 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

pleaded for Shakespeare, for Milton, for Dante, even for 
Homer ; no one thought it necessary to plead for Virgil, 
for Horace, for Boileau, Racine, Voltaire, Pope, Tasso, — 
these were accepted and recognised by all. To-day the 
first have completely gained their cause, and matters are 
quite the other way about : the great and primitive 
geniuses reign and triumph ; even those who come after 
them in invention, but are still naive and original in 
thought and expression, poets such as Regnier and Lu- 
cretius, are raised to their proper rank ; while the mod- 
erate, the cultured, the polished, those who were the 
classics to our fathers, we tend to make subordinate, 
and, if we are not careful, to treat a little too cavalierly. 
Something like disdain and contempt (relatively speak- 
ing) will soon be their portion. It seems to me that 
there is room for all, and that none need be sacrificed. 
Let us render full homage and complete reverence to 
those great human forces which are like the powers of 
nature, and which like them burst forth with something 
of strangeness and harshness ; but still let us not cease 
to honour those other forces which are more restrained, 
and which, in their less explosive expression, clothe 
themselves with elegance and sweetness. 

And this love of the golden tnean, joined with 
the long wanderings of his heart and his loneli- 
ness, produced in him a preference for scenes near 
at hand and for the quiet joys of the hearth. So 
it was that the idyllic tales of George Sand touched 
him quickly with their strange romance of the 
familiar. Chateaubriand and the others of that 
school had sought out the nature of India, the 
savannahs of America, the forests of Canada. 
"Here," he says, "are discoveries for you, — 



SAINTE-BEUVE 75 

deserts, mountains, the large horizons of Italj^; 
what remained to discover? That which was 
nearest to us, here in the centre of our own 
France. As happens always, what is most simple 
comes at the last. ' ' In the same way he praised 
the refined charm of a poet like Cowper, and 
sought to throw into relief the purer and more 
homely verses of a Parny : " If a little knowledge 
removes us, yet greater knowledge brings us back 
to the sentiment of the beauties and graces of the 
hearth." Indeed, there is something almost 
pathetic in the contrast between the life of this 
laborious recluse, with his sinister distrust of 
human nature, and the way in which he fondles 
this image of a sheltered and affectionate home. 

But the nineteenth century was not the seven- 
teenth, neither was Sainte-Beuve a Boileau, to 
stem the current of exaggeration and egotism. 
His innate sense of proportion brought him to see 
the dangerous tendencies of the day, and, failing 
to correct them, he sank deeper into that disillu- 
sion from which his weekly task was a long and 
vain labour of deliverance. He took to himself the 
saying of the Abbe Galiani: "Continue your 
works ; it is a proof of attachment to life to com- 
pose books." Yet it may be that this very dis- 
illusion was one of the elements of his success ; 
for after all, the real passion of literature, that 
perfect flower of the contemplative intellect, 
hardly comes to a man until the allurement of life 
has been dispelled by many experiences, each 



^6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

bringing its share of disappointment. Only, per- 
haps, when the hope of love (the spes anhni 
credula 7mitui) and the visions of ambition, the 
belief in pleasure and the luxurj' of grief, have 
lost their sting, do we turn to books with the 
contented understanding that the shadow is the 
reality, and the seeming reality of things is the 
shadow. At least for the critic, however it may 
be for the "creative" writer, this final deliverance 
from self-deception would seem to be necessary. 
Nor do I mean any invidious distinction when I 
separate the critic from the creative writer in this 
respect. I know there is a kind of hostility be- 
tween the two classes. The poet feels that the 
critic by the very possession of this self-knowledge 
sets himself above the writer who accepts the in- 
spiration of his emotions unquestioningly, while 
the critic resents the fact that the world at large 
looks upon his work as subordinate, if not super- 
fluous. And yet, in the case of criticism, such as 
Sainte-Beuve conceived it, this distinction almost 
ceases to exist. No stigma attaches to the work 
of the historian who recreates the political activi- 
ties of an age, to a Gibbon who raises a vast 
bridge between the past and the present. Yet, 
certainly, the best and most durable acts of man- 
kind are the ideals and emotions that go to make 
up its books, and to describe and judge the litera- 
ture of a country, to pass under review a thousand 
systems and reveries, to point out the meaning of 
each, and so write the annals of the human spirit, 



SAINTE-BEUVE 7/ 

to pluck out the heart of each man's mystery and 
set it before the mind's eye quivering with life, — • 
if this be not a labour of immense creative energy 
the word has no sense to my ears. We read and 
enjoy, and the past slips unceasingly from our 
memory. We are like the foolish peasant: the 
river of history rolls at our feet, and for ever will 
roll, while we stand and wait. And then comes 
this magician, who speaks a word, and suddenly 
the current is stopped ; who has power like the 
wizards of old to bid the tide turn back upon 
itself, and the past becomes to us as the present, 
and we are made the lords of time. I do not 
know how it affects others, but for me, as I look 
at the long row of volumes which hold the inter- 
pretation of French literature, I am almost over- 
whelmed at the magnitude of this man's 
achievement. 

Nor is it to be supposed that Sainte-Beuve, be- 
cause he was primarily a critic, drew his know- 
ledge of life from books only, and wrote, as it 
were, at second hand. The very contrary is true. 
As a younger man, he had mixed much with 
society, and even in his later years, when, as he 
says, he lived at the bottom of a well, he still, 
through his friendship with the Princesse Ma- 
thilde and others of the great world, kept in 
close touch with the active forces of the Empire. 
As a matter of fact, every one knows, who has 
read at all in his essays, that he was first of all 
a psychologist, and that his knowledge of the 



78 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

human breast was quite as sure as his acquaintance 
with Hbraries. He might almost be accused of 
slighting the written word in order to get at the 
secret of the writer. What attracted him chiefly 
was that middle ground where life and literature 
meet, where life becomes self-conscious through 
expression, and literature retains the reality of 
association with facts. "A little poesy," he 
thought, "separates us from history and the 
reality of things ; much of poesy brings us back." 
Literature to him was one of the arts of society. 
Hence he was never more at his ease, his touch 
was never surer and his eloquence more com- 
municable, than when he was dealing with the 
great ladies who guided the society of the eight- 
eenth century and retold its events in their let- 
ters and memoirs, — Mme. du Deflfand, Mme. de 
Grafigny, Mile, de Lespinasse, and those who 
preceded and followed. Nowhere does one get 
closer to the critic's own disappointment than 
when he says with a sigh, thinking of those irre- 
coverable days : " Happy time! all of life then was 
turned to sociability." And he was describing 
his own method as a critic, no less than the char- 
acter of Mile, de Lespinasse, when he wrote: 
" Her great art in society, one of the secrets of 
her success, was to feel the intelligence {P esprit) 
of others, to make it prevail, and to seem to for- 
get her own. Her conversation was never either 
above or below those with whom she spoke; she 
possessed measure, proportion, rightness of mind. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 79 

She reflected so well the impressions of others, 
and received so visibly the influence of their in- 
telligence, that they loved her for the success she 
helped them to attain. She raised this disposition 
to an art. 'Ah! ' she cried one day, ' how I long 
to know the foible of every one! ' " And this love 
of the social side of literature, this hankering 
after la bella scuola when men wrote under the 
sway of some central governance, explains Sainte- 
Beuve's feeling of desolation amidst the scattered, 
individualistic tendencies of his own day. 

There lie the springs of Sainte-Beuve's critical 
art, — his treatment of literature as a function of 
social life, and his search in all things for the 
golden mean. There we find his strength, and 
there, too, his limitation. If he fails anywhere, it 
is when he comes into the presence of those great 
and imperious souls who stand apart from the 
common concerns of men, and who rise above our 
homely mediocrities, not by extravagance or ego- 
tism, but by the lifting wings of inspiration. He 
could, indeed, comprehend the ascetic grandeur of 
a Pascal or the rolling eloquence of a Bossuet, but 
he was distrustful of that fervid breath of poesy 
that comes and goes unsummoned and uncon- 
trolled. It is a common charge against him that 
he was cold to the sublime, and he himself was 
aware of this defect, and sought to justify it. " II 
ne faut donner dans le sublime," he said, " qu'^ 
la derniere extremite et a son corps defendant." 
Something of this, too, must be held to account 



80 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

for the haunting melancholy that he could forget, 
but nei^er overcome. He might have lived with 
a kind of content in the society of those refined 
and v/orldly women of the eighteenth century, 
but, missing the solace of that support, he was 
unable amid the dissipated energies of his own 
age to rise to that surer peace that needs no com- 
munion with others for its fulfilment. Like the 
royal friend of Voltaire, he still lacked the high- 
est degree of culture, which is religion. He 
strove for that during many years, but alone he 
could not attain to it. As early as 1839 he wrote, 
while staying at Aigues-Mortes: " My soul is like 
this beach, where it is said Saint L,ouis embarked: 
the sea and faith, alas! have long since drawn 
away." One may excuse these limitations as the 
"defect of his quality," as indeed they are. But 
more than that, they belong to him as a French 
critic, as they are to a certain degree inherent in 
French literature. That literature and language, 
we have been told by no less an authority than 
M. Brunetiere, are pre-eminently social in their 
strength and their weakness. And Sainte-Beuve 
was indirectly justifying his own method when 
he pointed to the example of Voltaire, Moliere, 
La Fontaine, and Rabelais and Villon, the great 
ancestors. " They have all," he said, " a corner 
from which they mock at the sublime." I am 
even inclined to think that these qualities explain 
why England has never had, and may possibly 
never have, a critic in any way comparable to 



SAINTE-BEUVE 8 1 

Sainte-Beuve; for the chief glor>' of English litera- 
ture lies in the very field where French is weakest, 
in the lonel)^ and unsociable life of the spirit, just 
as the faults of English are due to its lack of dis- 
cipline and uncertaiuty of taste. And after all, 
the critical temperament consists primarily in just 
this linking together of literature and life, and in 
the levelling application of common sense. 

Yet if Sainte-Beuve is essentially French, in- 
deed almost inconceivable in English, he is still 
immensely valuable, perhaps even more valuable, 
to us for that very reason. There is nothing 
more wholesome than to dip into this strong and 
steady current of wise judgment. It is good for 
us to catch the glow of his masterful knowledge 
of letters and his faith in their supreme interest. 
His long row of volumes are the scholar's Summa 
Theologian. As John Cotton loved to sweeten his 
mouth with a piece of Calvin before he went to 
sleep, so the scholar may turn to Sainte-Beuve, 
sure of his never-failing abundance and his ripe 
intelligence. 

VOL. III. — 6. 



THE SCOTCH NOVELS AND SCOTCH 

HISTORY 

LiKK many another innocent, no doubt, I was 
seduced not long ago by the potent spell of Mr. 
Andrew Lang's name into reading his volumi- 
nous History of Scotland. Being too, like Mr. 
Lang, sealed of the tribe of Sir Walter, and 
knowing in a general way some of the romantic 
features of Scotch annals, I was led to suppose 
that these bulky volumes would be crammed from 
cover to cover with the pageantry of fair Romance. 
Alas, I soon learned, as I have so often learned 
before, that a little knowledge is a dangerous 
thing; and I was taught, moreover, a new appli- 
cation of several well-worn lines of Milton. Amid 
the inextricable feuds of Britons, Scots, Picts, and 
English; amid the incomprehensible medley of 
Bruces, Balliols, Stuarts, Douglases, Plantagenets, 
and Tudors; amid the horrid tumult of Roberts, 
Davids, Jameses, Malcolms (may their tribes de- 
crease!), Mr. Lang's reader, if he be of alien blood 
and foreign shores, wanders helpless and utterly 
bewildered. On leaving that sclva oscura I felt 
not unlike Milton's courageous hero (in courage 
only, I trust) before the realm of Chaos and eldest 
Night, where naught was perceptible but eternal 

82 



THE SCOTCH NOVELS^ 83 

anarchy and noise of endless wars. Yet with this 
bold adventurer it might be said by me: 

I come no spy, 
With purpose to explore or to disturb 
The secrets of your realm ; but by constraint 
Wandering this darksome desert, as my way 
Led through your spacious empire up to light. 

For throughout the labyrinth of all this anfractu- 
ous narrative there was indeed one guiding ray 
of light. As often as the author by way of anec- 
dote or allusion — and happily this occured pretty 
frequently — mentioned the works of Scott, a new 
and powerful interest was given to the page. The 
very name of Scott seemed providentially symboli- 
cal of his ofl5ce in literature, and through him 
Scots history has become a theme of significance 
to all the world. 

On the other hand, one is equally impressed by 
the fact that the novels owe much of their vitality 
to the manner in which they voice the spirit of 
the national life; and we recognise the truth, 
often maintained and as often disputed, that the 
final verdict on a novelist's work is generally de- 
termined by the authenticity of his portraiture, 
not of individuals, but of a people, and conse- 
quently by the lasting significance of the phase 
of society or national life portrayed. 

The conditions of the novel should seem in this 
respect to be quite different from those of the 
poem. We are conscious within ourselves of some 



84 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

principle of isolation and exclusion — the prin- 
cipium individuationis, as the old schoolmen called 
it — that obstructs the completion of our being, of 
some contracting force of nature that dwarfs our 
sympathies with our fellow-men, that hinders the 
development of our full humanity, and denies the 
validity of our hopes; and the office of the imagi- 
nation and of the imaginative arts is for a while 
to break down the walls of this narrowing indi- 
viduality and to bestow on us the illusion of 
unconfiued liberty. 

But if the end of the arts is the same, their 
methods are various, and this variety extends 
even to the different genres of literature. The 
manner of the epic, and in a still higher degree 
of the tragedy, is so to arouse the will and under- 
standing that their clogging limitations seem to 
be swept away, until through our sympathy with 
the hero we feel ourselves to be acting and speak- 
ing the great passions of humanity in their fullest 
and freest scope; for this reason we call the char- 
acters of the poem types, and we believe that the 
poet under the impulse of his inspiration is car- 
ried into a region above our vision, where, like the 
exalted souls in Plato's dream, he beholds face to 
face the great ideas of which our worldly life and 
circumstances are but faulty copies. In this way 
Achilles stands as the perfect warrior, and Odys- 
seus as the enduring man of wiles; Hamlet is the 
man of doubts, and Satan the creature of rebel- 
lious pride. It may be that this eflfort or inspira- 



THE SCOTCH NOVELS 8$ 

tion ot the poet to represent mankind in idealised 
form will account in part for the peculiar tinge of 
melancholy that is commonly an attribute of the 
artistic temperament, — for the brooding uncer- 
tainty of Shakespeare, if as many think Hamlet is 
the true voice of his heart, for the feeling of 
baffled despair which led Goethe to create Faust, 
and for the self-tormenting of Childe Harold. It 
is because the dissolving power of genius and the 
personality of the man can never be quite recon- 
ciled; he is detached from nature and attached to 
her at the same time. On the one hand his genius 
draws him to contemplate life with the disinter- 
estedness of a mind free from the attachments of 
the individual, while on the other hand his own 
personality, often of the most ardent character, 
drags him irresistibly to seek the satisfaction of 
individual emotions. I,ike the Empedocles of 
Matthew Arnold, baffled in the ineffable longing 
to escape themselves, these bearers of the divine 
light are haled unwillingly 

Back to this meadow of calamity, 

This uucongeuial place, this human life. 

What to the reader is merely a pleasant and mo- 
mentary illusion, or a salutary excitation from 
without, is in the creative poet a partial dissolu- 
tion of his own personality. Shakespeare was not 
dealing in empty words when he likened the poet 
to the lover and the lunatic as being of imagina- 
tion all compact; nor was Plato speaking mere 



86 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

metaphor when he said that "the poet is a light 
and winged and holy thing, and there is no in- 
vention in him until he has been inspired and is 
out of his senses and the mind is no longer in 
him." In the hour of inspiration some darkened 
window is opened on the horizon to eyes that are 
ordinarily confined within the four walls of his 
meagre self, a door is thrown open to the heaven - 
sweeping gales, he hears for a brief while the 
voice of the Over-soul speaking a language that 
with all his toil he can barely render into human 
speech; — and when at last the door is closed, the 
vision gone, and the voice hushed, he sits in the 
darkened chamber of his own person, silent and 
forlorn. 

I would not presume to describe absolutely the 
inner state of the poet when life appears to him 
in its ideal form, but the means by which he con- 
veys his illusion to the reader is quite clear. The 
rhythm of his verse produces on the mind some- 
thing of the stimulating effect of music and this 
effect is enhanced by the use of language and 
metaphor lifted out of the common mould. Prose, 
however, has no such resources to impose on the 
fancy a creation of its own, in which the indi- 
vidual will is raised above itself. On the con- 
trary, the office of the novel — and this we see 
more clearly as fiction grows regularly more real- 
istic — is to represent life as controlled by environ- 
ment and to portray human beings as the servants 
of the flesh. This, I take it, was the meaning of 



THE SCOTCH NOVELS 8/ 

Goethe in his definition of the genres: "In the 
novel sentiments and events chiefly are exhibited, 
in the drama characters and deeds." The pro- 
cedure of the novel must be, so to speak, a passive 
one. It depicts man as a creature of circumstance, 
and its only method of escape is so to encompass 
the individual in circumstance as to lend to his 
separate life something of the pomp of univer- 
sality. It eflfects its purpose by breadth rather 
than by exaltation. Its truest aim is not to repre- 
sent the actions of a single man as noteworthy 
in themselves, but to represent the life of a people 
or a phase of society; in the great sweep of hu- 
man activity something of the same largeness and 
freedom is produced as in the poetic idealisation 
of the individual will in the drama. Thus it hap- 
pens that the artistic validity of a novel depends 
first of all on the power of the author to portray 
broadly and veraciously some aspect of this wider 
existence. 

Balzac, in some respects the master novelist, 
was clearly conscious of this aim of his art; and 
his Comedie Hjunaine is a supreme effort to grasp 
the whole range of French society. Nor would it 
be difl5cult in the case of the greater English 
novelists to show that unwittingly— an English- 
man rarely if ever has the same knowledge of his 
art as a Frenchman — they obeyed the same law. 
We admire Fielding and Smollett not so much for 
■ their individual characterisations as for the joy 
we feel in escaping our conventional timidity in 



88 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

the old-time tumultuous country life of England, 
with all its rude strength and even its vulgarity. 
By a natural contrast we read Jane Austen for her 
picture of rural security and stability, and are 
glad to forget the vexations and uncertainties of 
life's warfare in that gentle round of society, 
where greed and passion are reduced to petty 
foibles, and where the errors of mankind only 
furnish material for malicious but innocent satire. 
With Thackeray we put on the veneer of artificial 
society which was the true idealism inherited by 
him from the eighteenth century; and we move 
more freely amidst that gai monde because there 
runs through the story of it such a biting satire 
of worldliness and snobbishness as flatters us with 
the feeling of our own superioritj'. In Dickens 
we are carried into the very opposite field of life, 
and for a while we move with those who are the 
creatures of grotesque whims and emotions: cari- 
catures we call his people, but deep in our hearts 
we know that each of us longs at times to be as 
humanity is in Dickens's world, the perfect and 
unreflecting creature of his dearest whim — for 
this too is liberty. Thus it is that the interest of 
the novel depends as much, or almost as much, on 
the intrinsic value of the national life or phase of 
societ}'^ reproduced as on the skill of the writer. 
The prose author is in this respect far less a free 
agent than the poet and far more the subject of 
his environment; for he deals less with the un- 
changing laws of character and more with what 



THE SCOTCH NOVELS 89 

he perceives outwardly about him. It is this fact 
which leads many readers to prefer the English 
novelists to the French, although the latter 
are unquestionably the greater masters of their 
craft. 

Now the peculiar good fortune of Scott in this 
matter was most strongly brought home to me in 
reading the narrative work of Mr. Ivang. Fine 
and entertaining as are Scott's more professedly 
historical novels, such as Ivanhoc and Quentiii 
Durward, I do not believe they could ever have 
resisted the invasion of time were thej'- not bol- 
stered up by the stories that deal more directly 
with the realities of Scotch life. There is, to be 
sure, in the foreign tales a wonderfully pure vein 
of romance; but romantic writing in prose cannot 
endure unless firmlj^ grounded in realism, or un- 
less, like Hawthorne's work, it is surcharged with 
spiritual meanings. Not having the power pos- 
sessed by verse to convey illusion, it lacks also 
the vitality of verse. Younger readers may take 
naturally to Ivanhoe or The Talisman, because 
very little is required to evoke illusion with them. 
More mature readers turn oftenest to Guy Man- 
nering and those tales in which the romance is 
the realism of Scotch life, finding here a fulness 
of interest that is more than a compensation for 
the frequent slovenliness of Scott's language and 
for the haphazard construction of his plots. 

These negligences of the indifferent craftsman 
might, perhaps, need no such compensation, for 



90 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

we have grown hardened at last to slovenliness 
in fiction. But there are other limitations to 
Scott's powers that show more clearly how much 
of his fame rests on the substratum of national life 
on which he builds. An infinite variety of char- 
acters, from kings in the council hall down to 
strolling half-witted gaberlunzies, move through 
the pages of his novels; but, and the fact is no- 
torious, the great Scotchman was little better at 
painting the purple light of young desire than was 
our own Cooper. There is something like love- 
making in Rob Roy, and Di Vernon has been 
signalised by Mr. Saintsbury as one of his five 
chosen heroines; but in general the scenes that 
form the ecstasy of most romance are dead and 
perfunctory in Scott. And this is the more re- 
markable since we know that he himself was a 
lover — and a disappointed lover, which is vastly 
more to the point in art, as all the world knows. 
But in fact this inability to portray the softer emo- 
tions is not an isolated phenomenon in Scott; he 
skims very lightly over most of the deeper pas- 
sions of the heart, seeming to avoid them except 
in so far as they express themselves in action. 
His novels contain no adequate picture of remorse 
or hatred, love or jealousy; neither do they con- 
tain any such psychological analysis of the emo- 
tions as has made the fame of subsequent writers. 
But there is an infinite variet}' of characters in 
action, and a perfect understanding of that form 
of the imagination which displays itself in whim- 



THE SCOTCH NOVELS 9I 

sicalities corresponding to the "originals" or 
"humourists " of the Elizabethan comedy. 

The numberless quotations from "old plays" 
at the head of Scott's chapters are not without 
significance. At times he approaches closer to 
Shakespeare than any other writer, whether of 
prose or verse. In one scene at least in The Bride 
of Lanwicrmoor, where he describes the "singular 
and gloomy delight" of the three old cummers 
about the body of their contemporary, he lets us 
know that he has in mind the meeting of the 
witches in Macbeth, and I think on the whole he 
excels the dramatist in his own field. After all 
is said, the Shakespearian witch-scene is an arbi- 
trar)'- exercise of the fancy, which fails to carry 
with it a complete sense of reality: the illusion is 
not fully maintained. The dialogue in the novel- 
ist, on the contrary, is instinct with thrilling sug- 
gestiveness, for the very reason that it is based on 
the groundwork of national character. The su- 
perstitious awe is here simple realism, from the 
beginning of the scene down to the warning cry 
of the paralytic hag from the cottage: 

" He 's a frank man, and a free-handed man, the Mas- 
ter," said Annie Winnie, "and a comely personage — 
broad in the shouthers, and narrow around the lunyies. 
He wad mak a bonny corpse ; I wad like to hae the 
streiking and winding o' him." 

"It is written on his brow, Annie Winnie," returned 
the octogenarian, her companion, "that hand of woman, 
or of man either, will never straught him ; dead-deal will 



92 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

never be laid on his back, make you your market of that, 
for I hae it frae a sure hand." 

"Will it be his lot to die on the battle-ground then, 
Ailsie Gourlay ? Will he die by the sword or the ball, as 
his forbears hae dune before him, mony ane o' them ? " 

"Ask nae mair questions about it — he '11 no be graced 
sae far," replied the sage. 

"I ken ye are wiser than ither folk, Ailsie Gourlay. 
But wha tell'd ye this ? " 

" Fashna your thumb about that, Annie Winnie," an- 
swered the sibyl. " I hae it frae a hand sure eneugh." 

"But ye said ye never saw the foul thief," reiterated 
her inquisitive companion. 

" I hae it frae as sure a hand," said Ailsie, " and frae 
them that spaed his fortune before the sark gaed ower 
his head." 

"Hark! I hear his horse's feet riding aflf," said the 
other; "they dinna sound as if good luck was wi' 
them." 

"Mak haste, sirs," cried the paralytic hag from the 
cottage, " and let us do what is needfu', and say what is 
fitting; for, if the dead corpse binna straughted, it will 
girn and thraw, and that will fear the best o' us." 

But more often Scott approaches the lesser 
lights of the Elizabethan comedians, whose work 
is in general subject to the same laws as the 
novel, and who filled their plays with whimsical 
creatures — 

Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more, 

Whose manners, now called humours, feed the stage. 

You cannot read through the dramatis personcs of 
one of these plays (Witgood, Lucre, Hoard, 
lyimber, Kix, Lamprey, Spichcock, Dampit, etc.) 



THE SCOTCH NOVELS 93 

without being reminded of the long list of origi- 
nals that figure in the Scotch novels; and in one 
case at least, Baron Bradwardine of Waver/ej', 
Scott goes out of his way to compare him with a 
character of Ben Jonson's. And you cannot but 
feel that Scott has surpassed his models on their 
own ground, partly because his genius was greater 
and partly because the novel is a wider and freer 
field for such characters than the drama — at least 
when the drama is deprived of its stage setting. 
But Scott's greatest advantage is due to the fact 
that what in England was mainly an exaggeration 
of the more unsociable traits of character seems in 
Scotland to reach down to the very foundation of 
the popular life. His characters are not the crea- 
tion of individual eccentricities only, but spring 
from an inexhaustible quaintness of the national 
temper. From every standpoint we are led back 
to consider the greatness of the author as depend- 
ing on his happy genius in finding a voice for a 
rare and noteworthy phase of society. 

Much of the Scotch temperament, its self-de- 
pendence, clan attachments, cunning, its gloomy 
exaltations relieved at times by a wide and serene 
prospect, may be traced, as Buckle has so admir- 
ably shown, to the physical conditions of the 
land; and in reading the history of Scotland, 
with its stories of the adventures of Wallace 
and Bruce and its battles of Bannockburn and 
Prestonpans, it seems quite fitting that the 
wild scenery of the country should be constantly 



94 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

associated with the deeds of its heroes. There 
is something of charm in the very names of the 
landscape — in the haughs, corries, straths, friths, 
burns, and braes. The fascination of the Scotch 
lakes and valle5^s was one of the first to awaken 
the world to an admiration of savage nature, as 
we may read in Gray's letters; and Scott, from 
Waverley's excursion into the wild fastnesses of 
highland robbers and chiefs to the lonely sea- 
scenes of Zetland in The Pirate, has carried us 
through a succession of natural pictures such as 
no other novelist ever conceived. And he has 
maintained always that most difl&cult art of de- 
scribing minutely enough to convey the illusion 
of a particular scene and broadly enough to evoke 
those general emotions which alone justify de- 
scriptive writing. Perhaps his most notable suc- 
cess is the visit of Guy Maunering to Ellangowan, 
where sea, sky, and land unite to form a picture 
of strangely luminous beauty. He not only suc- 
ceeded in exciting a new romantic interest in 
Scotch scenery, but he has actually added to the 
market price of properties. It is said that his 
descriptions are mentioned in the title deeds of 
various estates as forming a part of their trans- 
mitted value. 

But the scenery depicted by Scott is only the 
setting of a curious and paradoxical life, and it is 
the light thrown on this life that lends the chief 
interest to Mr. Lang's History. Owing in part 
to the peculiar position and formation of the land, 



THE SCOTCH NOVELS 95 

and in part to the strain of Celtic blood in the 
Highland tribes, there was bred in the Scotch 
people an unusual mingling of romance and real- 
ism, of imagination and worldl}- cunning, that sets 
them quite apart from other races; and this para- 
doxical mingling of opposite tendencies shows 
itself in the quality of their politics, their religion, 
and in all their social manners. 

Not the least interesting of Mr. Lang's chapters 
is that in which he analyses the feudal chivalry of 
Scotland, and explains how it rested on a more 
imaginative basis than in other countries; how 
the power of the chief hung on unwritten rights 
instead of formal charters, and how the loyalty 
of the clansmen was exalted to the highest pitch 
of personal enthusiasm. But to complete the pic- 
ture one should read Buckle's scathing arraign- 
ment of a loyalty which was ready to sell its king 
and was no purer than the faith that holds to- 
gether a band of murderous brigands. So, too, in 
religion the Scotch were perhaps more given to 
superstition, and were more ready to sacrifice life 
and all else for their belief than any other people 
of Europe, except the Spaniards, while at the same 
time their bigotry never interfered with a vein of 
caution and shrewd worldliness. There is in 
Waverley an admirable example at once of this 
paradoxical nature, and of the true basis of Scott's 
strength. In the loyalism of Flora Maclvor he 
has attempted to embody an ideal of the imagi- 
nation not based on this national mingling of 



96 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

qualities — though, of course, isolated individuals 
of that heroic type may have existed in the land; 
and as a result he has produced a character that 
leaves the reader perfectly cold aud unconvinced. 
But the moment Waverley comes from the Mac- 
Ivors and descends to the real life of Scotland, 
mark the change. We are immediately put on 
terra firma by the cautious reply of Waverley's 
guide when asked if it is Sunday: "Could na say 
just preceesely; Sunday seldom cam aboon the 
pass of Bally-Brough. ' ' Consider the mixture of 
bigotry and worldly greed in Mr. Ebenezer Cruik- 
shanks, the innkeeper, who compounds for the 
sin of receiving a traveller on fastday by doubling 
the tariff. In any other land Mr. Ebenezer 
Cruikshank would have been a hypocrite and a 
scoundrel; in Scotland his religious fervour is 
quite as genuine as his cunning; and the very 
audacity of the combination carries with it the 
conviction of realism. 

The same contrast of qualities will be found to 
mark the lesser traits of character. Consider the 
long list of servants and retainers with their stiflf- 
necked devotion and their incorrigible self-seek- 
ing. In one of his notes Scott relates the story 
of a retainer who when ordered to leave his mas- 
ter's service replied: "In troth, and that will I 
not; if your honour disna ken when ye hae a gude 
servant, I ken when I hae a gude master, and go 
away I will not." At another time, when his 
master cried out in vexation: " John, you and I 



THE SCOTCH NOVELS 97 

shall never sleep under the same roof again ! " 
the fellow calmly retorted, "Where the deil can 
your honour be ganging?" In like manner the 
mixture of devotion and self-seeking in that 
quaintest of followers, Richie Moniplies, is worth 
a thousand false idealisations. To read almost on 
the same page his immovable loyalty to Nigel and 
his brazen treachery in presenting his own peti- 
tion first to the King, is to gain at once an en- 
trance into a new region of psychology and to 
acquire a truer understanding of Scotch history. 
At another time, when catechised about the al- 
leged spirit in Master Heriot's house, the good 
Moniplies gives an example of combined supersti- 
tion, scepticism, and cunning, which must be 
read at length — and all the world has read it — to 
be appreciated. Perhaps the most useful illustra- 
tion to be gained from this same Moniplies is the 
strange contrast of solemnity and humour, of rev- 
erence and familiarity, exhibited by him. I need 
not repeat the description of that "half-pedant, 
half-bully," nor quote the whole of his account 
of meeting with the King; let it be enough to call 
attention to the curious mingling of mirth and 
solemnity in the way he apostrophises the royal 
James: "My certie, lad, times are changed since 
ye came fleeing down the backstairs of auld Holy- 
rood House, in grit fear, having your breeks in 
your hand without time to put them on, and 
Frank Stewart, the wild Karl of Both well, hard 
at your haunches." There is in the temper of 



98 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

worthy Moniplies something wholly different 
from the boisterous humour of England and from 
the dry laughter of America; and this is due to 
the continually upcropping substratum of im- 
agination and romance in his character. He 
would resemble the grotesque seriousness of Don 
Quixote, were it not for a strain of sourness and 
suspicion that are quite foreign to the generous 
Hidalgo. 

So we might follow the paradox of Scotch char- 
acter through its union of gloomy moroseness 
with homely affections, of unrestrained emotional- 
ism with cold calculation, of awesome second-sight 
with the cheapest charlatanr3\ In the end, per- 
haps, all these contradictions would resolve them- 
selves into the one peculiar anomaly of seeing the 
free romance of enthusiasm rising like a flower — a 
flower often enough of sinister aspect — out of the 
most prosaic grossness. Certainly it is the chief 
interest of Scotch history — by showing that these 
contradictions actually exist in the national tem- 
perament and by explaining so far as may be their 
origin — to confirm for us our belief in what may 
be called the realism of Scott's romance. This is 
that guiding thread which leads the weary voy- 
ager through the mists and chaotic confusions of 
Caledonian annals up to light. And in that region 
of light what wonderful cheer for the soul! Here, 
if anywhere in prose, the illusions of the imagina- 
tion may take pleasant possession of our heart, 
for they come with the authority of a great na- 



THE SCOTCH NOVELS 99 

tional experience and walk hand in hand with the 
soberest realities. Even the wild enthusiasm of 
a Meg Merrilies barely awakens the voice of slum- 
bering scepticism in the midst of our secure con- 
viction. And sojourning for a while in that world 
of strange enchantment we seem to feel the limita- 
tions that vex our larger hopes and hem in our 
wills broken down at the command of a magic 
voice. It is as if that incompleteness of our na- 
ture, which the schoolmen called in their fantastic 
jargon \h& principhivi individuationis and ascribed 
to the bondage of these material bodies, were for 
a time forgotten, while we form a part of that free 
and complex existence so faithfully portrayed ia 
the Scotch novels. 



SWINBURNE 

It is no more than fair to confess at the outset 
that my knowledge of Swinburne's work until re- 
cently was of the scantiest. The patent faults of 
his style were of a kind to warn me away, and it 
might be equally true that I was not sufficiently 
open to his peculiar excellences. Gladly, there- 
fore, I accepted the occasion offered by the new 
edition of his Collected Poems ' to enlarge my ac- 
quaintance with one of the much-bruited names 
of the age. Nor did it seem right to trust to a 
hasty impression. The six volumes of his poems, 
together with the plays and critical essays, have 
lain on my table for several months, the com- 
panions of many a long day of leisure and the 
relish thrown in between other readings of pleas- 
ure and necessity. Yet even now I must admit 
something alien to me in the man and his work; 
I am not sure that I always distinguish between 
what is spoken with the lips only and what springs 
from the poet's heart. Possibly the lack of bio- 
graphical information is the partial cause of this 
uncertainty, for by a curious anomaly Swinburne, 
one of the most egotistical writers of the century, 

' The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne. In six 
volumes. New York : Harper & Brothers. 1904. 

100 



SWINBURNE lOI 

has shown a fine reticence in keeping the details 
of his hfe from the public. He was, we know, 
born in London, in 1837, of an ancient and noble 
famil}^ his father, as befitted one whose son was 
to sing of the sea so lustily, being an admiral in 
the navy. His early years were passed either at 
his grandfather's estate in Northumbria or at the 
home of his parents in the Isle of Wight. From 
Eton he went, after an interval of two j^ears, to 
Balliol College, Oxford, leaving in 1S60 without 
a degree. The story runs that he knew more 
Greek than his examiners, but failed to show a 
proper knowledge of Scripture. If the tale is 
true, he made up well in after years for the de- 
ficiency, for few of our poets have been more 
steeped in the language of the Bible. In London 
he came under the influence of many of the cur- 
rents moving below the surface; the spell of that 
master of souls, Rossetti, touched him, and the 
dominance of the ardent Mazzini. Since 1879 he 
has lived at " The Pines," on the edge of Wim- 
bledon Common, with Mr. Watts- Dunton, in 
what appears to be an ideal atmosphere of sym- 
pathetic friendship. Mr. Douglas's recent indis- 
cretion on Theodore Watts- Dun ion tells nothing of 
the life in this scholarly retreat, but it does con- 
tain many photogravures of the works of art, the 
handicraft of Rossetti largely, which adorn the 
dwelling with beautiful memories. 

Such is the meagre outline of Swinburne's life, 
nor do the few other events recorded or the 



LIBRARY 

UNlVEKSiTY OF CALIFORNIA 

FIVERSiDE 



I02 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

authentic anecdotes help us much to a more inti- 
mate knowledge of the man. Yet he has the am- 
biguous gift of awakening curiosity. Probably 
the first question most people ask on laying down 
his Poems and Ballads {\h2i^ peche dejeunesse, as he 
afterwards called it) is to know how much of the 
book is "true." Mr. Swinburne has expressed a 
becoming contempt for "the scornful or mournful 
censors who insisted on regarding all the studies 
of passion or sensation attempted or achieved in 
it as either confessions of positive fact or excur- 
sions of absolute fancy. ' ' One does not like to be 
classed among the scornful or mouryiftd, and yet I 
should feel much easier in my appreciation of the 
Poems a7id Ballads if I knew how far they were 
based on the actual experience of the author. The 
reader of Swinburne feels constantly as if his feet 
were swept from the earth and he were carried 
into a misty mid-region where blind currents of 
air beat hither and thither; he longs for some 
anchor to reality. In the later books this sensa- 
tion becomes almost painful, and it is because the 
earlier publications, the Atalanta and the first 
Poems and Ballads, contain more of definable hu- 
man emotion, whatever their relation to fact may 
be, that they are likely to remain the most popu- 
lar and significant of Swinburne's works. 

The publication of Atalanta at the age of 
twenty-eight made him famous. Poems and Ballads 
the next year made him almost infamous. The 
alarm aroused in England by Dolores and Faustine 



SWINBURNE 103 

Still vibrates in our ears as we repeat the wonder- 
ful rhythms. The impression is deepened by the 
remarkable unity of feeling that runs through 
these voluble songs — the feeling of infinite satiety. 
The satiety of the flesh hangs like a fatal web 
about the Laiis Veneris; the satiety of disappoint- 
ment clings "with sullen savour of poisonous 
pain " to The Triumph of Time; satiety speaks in 
the Hymn to Proserpine, with its regret for the 
passing of the old heathen gods; it seeks relief in 
the unnatural passion oi Anactoria — 

Clothed with deep eyelids under and above — 
Yea, all thy beauty sickens me with love ; 

turns to the abominations of cruelty in Fanstine ; 
sings enchantingly of rest in The Garden of 
Proserpine — 

Here, where the world is quiet, 
Here, where all trouble seems 

Dead winds' and speut waves' riot 
In doubtful dreams of dreams ; 

I watch the green field growing 

For reaping folk and sowing, 

For harvest-time and mowing, 
A sleepy world of streams. 

I am tired of tears and laughter, 
And men that laugh and weep, 
Of what may come hereafter 
For men that sow to reap : 
I am weary of days and hours, 
Blown buds of barren flowers, 
Desires and dreams and powers 
And everything but sleep. 



104 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

Now the acquiescence of weariness may have 
its inner compensations, even its sacred joys; but 
satiety, with its torturing impotence and its 
hungering for forbidden fruit, is perhaps the most 
immoral word in the language; its unashamed 
displajr causes a kind of phj^sical revulsion in any 
wholesome mind. My own feeling is that Swin- 
burne, when he wrote these poems, had little 
knowledge or experience of the world, but, as 
sometimes happens with unbalanced natures, had 
sucked poison from his classical reading until his 
brain was in a kind of ferment. While in this 
state he fell under the spell of Baudelaire's de- 
liberate perversion of the passions, with results 
which threw the innocent Philistines of England 
into a fine bewilderment of horror. That the 
poet's own heart was sound at core, and that his 
satiety was of the imagination and not of the 
body, would seem evident from the abruptness 
with which he passed, under a more wholesome 
stimulus, to a very different mood. Unfortu- 
nately, his maturer productions are lacking in 
the quality of human emotion which, however 
derived, pulsates in every line of the Poems and 
Ballads. There is a certain contagion in such a 
song as Dolores. Taking all things into consid- 
eration, and with all one's repulsion for its sub- 
stance, that poem is still the most effective of 
Swinburne's works, a magnificent lyric of blended 
emotion and music. It is a personification of the 
mood which produced the whole book, a cry of 



SWINBURNE 105 

the tormented heart to our Lady of Satiety. It is 
filled with regret for a past of riotous pleasure; it 
pants with the lust of blood; it is gorgeous and 
heavily scented, and the rhythm of it is the sway- 
ing of bodies drunken with voluptuousness: 

Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges ; 

Thou art fed with perpetual breath, 
And alive after infinite changes, 

And fresh from the kisses of death ; 
Of languors rekindled and rallied, 

Of barren delights and unclean. 
Things monstrous and fruitless, a pallid 

And poisonous queen. 

Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you? 

Men touch them, and change in a trice 
The lilies and languors of virtue 

For the raptures and roses of vice ; 
Those lie where thy foot on the floor is. 

These crown and caress thee and chain, 
O splendid and sterile Dolores, 

Our Lady of Pain. 

No doubt you will find here in germ all that 
was to mar the poet's later work. The rhythm 
lacks resistance; there is no definite vision evoked 
out of the rapid flux of images; the thought has 
no sure control over the words. Dolores is al- 
most in the same breath the queen of languors 
and raptures; she is pallid and rosy, and a hostile 
criticism might find in the stanzas a succession of 
contradictions. Compare the poem with the few 



I06 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

lines in Jejiny where Rossetti has expressed the 
same idea of man's inveterate lust: 

Like a toad within a stone 
Seated while Time crumbles on ; 
Which sits there since the earth was cursed 
For Man's transgression at the first— 

and the diiference is immediately apparent be- 
tween that concentration of mind which sums up 
a thought in a single definite image and the fluc- 
tuating, impalpable vision of a poet carried away 
by the intoxication of words. AH that is true, 
and yet, somehow, out of this poem of Dolores 
there does arise in the end a very real and mem- 
orable mood — real after the fashion of a mood 
excited by music rather than by painting or 
sculpture. 

The Poems and Ballads are splendid but viahain; 
they are impressive and they have the strength, 
ambiguous it may be, of springing, directly or 
indirectly, from a genuine emotion of the body. 
The change on passing to the Songs Before Sun- 
rise (published in 1 871) is extraordinary. During 
the five years that elapsed between these volumes 
the two master passions of Swinburne's life laid 
hold on him with devastating effect — the passion 
of Liberty and the passion of the Sea. Hence- 
forth the influence of Mazzini and Victor Hugo 
was to dominate him like an obsession. Now, 
heaven forbid that one should say or think any- 
thing in despite of Liberty ! The mere name con- 



SWINBURNE 107 

j ures up recollections of glory and pride, and in it 
the hopes of the future are involved. And yet 
the very magnitude of its content renders it 
peculiarly liable to misuse. To this man it means 
one thing, and to another another, and many 
might cry out in the end, as Brutus did over vir- 
tue: "Thou art a naked word, and I followed 
thee as though thou hadst been a substance!" 
Certainly nothing is more dangerous for a poet 
than to fall into the habit of mouthing those 
great words of liberty, virtue, patriotism, and 
the like, abstracted of very definite events and 
very precise imagery. To Swinburne the sound 
of liberty was a charm to cast him into a kind of 
frothing mania. It is true that one or two of the 
poems on this theme are lifted up with a superb 
and genuine lyric enthusiasm. The Eve of Revo- 
lution, for instance, with which the Songs Before 
Sunrise open, rings with the stirring noise of 
trumpets: 

I hear the midnight on the mountains cry 
With many tongues of thunders, and I hear 

Sound and resound the hollow shield of sky 

With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer, 

And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly. 
Through flight and fight and. all the fluctuant fear. . . . 

But even here the reverberation of the words be- 
gins to conceal their meaning, and stich abstrac- 
tions as "the roar of the hours" lead into the 
worst of Swinburne's faults. Many of the longer 



I08 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

hymns to liberty are nearly unreadable — at least 
if any one can endure to the end of A Song of 
Italy, it is not I. And as one goes through these 
rhapsodies that came out year after year, one be- 
gins to feel that Swinburne's notion of liberty, 
when it is not empty of meaning, is something 
even worse. Too often it is Kipling's gross 
idolatry of England uttered in a kind of hysteri- 
cal falsetto. It was not pretty at a time of 
estrangement between England and France to 
speak of "French hounds whose necks are aching 
Still from the chain they crave ' ' ; and one needed 
not to sympathise with the Boers in the South 
African war to feel something like disgust at 
Swinburne's abuse: 

. . . the truth whose witness now draws near 
To scourge these dogs, agape with jaws afoam, 
Down out of life. 

Probably the poet thought he was giving voice to 
a righteous and Miltonic indignation. The best 
criticism of such a sonnet is to turn to Milton's 
"Avenge, O lyOrd, thy slaughtered saints." 

I have read somewhere a story of Swinburne's 
driving up late to a dinner and entering into a 
violent altercation with the cabman, to the vast 
amusement of the waiting guests within the 
house. That incorrigible wag and hanger-on of 
genius, Charles Augustus Howell, was of the party 
and acted as chorus to the dialogue outside. 



SWIxNBUKNE 109 

" The poet's got the best of it, as usual," drawls 
the chorus. "He lives at the British Hotel in 
Cockspur Street, and uever goes anywhere except 
in hansoms, which, whatever the distance, he in- 
variably remunerates with one shilling. Conse- 
quently, when, as to-day, it 's a case of two miles 
beyond the radius, there 's the devil's own row; 
but in the matter of imprecation the poet is more 
than a match for cabby, who, after five minutes of 
it, gallops oflF as though he had been rated by 
Beelzebub himself." Really, 't is a bit of gossip 
which may be taken as a comment on not a few 
of Swinburne's dithyrambs of liberty. 

Not less noble in significance is that other word, 
the sea, which Swinburne now uses with endless 
reiteration. In his reverence for the weltering 
ocean ways, the bulwark of England's freedom, 
he does of course only follow the best traditions 
of English poetry from Beowulf \.o The Seven Seas 
of Kipling, who is again in this his imitator. 
Nor is it the world of water alone that dominates 
his imagination, but with it the winds and th© 
panorama of the sky ever rolling aDove. Already 
in the Poems and Ballads thcire is a hint of the 
sympathy between the poet and this realm of 
water and air. One of the finest passages in The 
Triumph of Time is that which begins: 

I -will go back to the great sweet mother, 

Mother and lover of men, the sea. 
I will go down to her, i and none other, 

Close with her, kisu her and mix her with me. 



no SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

But for the most part the atmosphere of those 
poems was too sultry for the salt spray of ocean, 
and it is only with the Sotigs Before Sunrise, with 
the obsession of the idea of liberty, that we are 
carried to the wide sea "that makes immortal 
motion to and fro," and to the " shrill, fierce 
climes of inconsolable air." Thenceforth the 
reader is like some wave-tossed mariner who 
should take refuge in the cave of ^olus; at least 
he is forced to admire the genius that presides 
over the gusty concourse : 

Hie vasto rex ^olus antro 
Luctantis ventos tempestatesque sonoras 
Imperio premit ac vinclis et carcere frenat. 
Illi indignantes magno cum murmure montis 
Circum claustra fremunt. 

The comparison is not so far-fetched as it might 
seem. There is a picture of Swinburne in the 
Recollections of the late Henry Treffry Dunn which 
almost personifies him as the storm-king: 

It had been a very sultry day, and with the advancing 
twilight, heavy thunder-clouds were rolling up. The 
door opened and Swinburne entered. He appeared in 
an abstracted state, and for a few minutes sat silent. 
Soon, something I had said anent his last poem set his 
thoughts loose. Like the storm that had just broken, so 
he began in low tones to utter lines of poetry. As the 
storm increased, he got more and more excited and car- 
ried away by the impulse of his thoughts, bursting into a 
torrent of splendid verse that seemed like some grand air 



SWINBURNE III 

■with the distant peals of thunder as an intermittent ac- 
companiment. And still the storm waxed more violent, 
and the vivid flashes of lightning became more frequent. 
But Swinburne seemed unconscious of it all, and whilst 
he paced up and down the room, pouring out bursts of 
passionate declamation, faint electric sparks played 
round the wavy masses of his luxuriant hair. . . . 
Amidst the rattle of the thunder he still continued to 
pour out his thoughts, his voice now sinking low and 
sad, now waxing louder as the storm listed. 

The scattered poems in his later books that rise 
abov^e the Poems and Ballads with a kind of 
grandiose suggestiveness are for the most part 
filled with echoes of wind and water. That 
haunting picture of crumbling desolation, A 
Forsaken Garden, lies "at the sea-down's edge be- 
tween windward and lee." One of the few poems 
that seem to contain the cry of a real experience, 
At a Month'' s End, combines this aspect of nature 
admirably with human emotion: 

Silent we went an hour together. 
Under grey skies by waters white. 

Our hearts were full of windy iveather. 
Clouds and blown stars and broken light. 

And the sensation left from a reading of Tristram 
of Lyonesse is of a vast phantasmagoria, in which 
the beating of waves and the noise of winds, the 
light of dawns breaking on the water, and the 
floating web of stars, are jumbled together in 
splendid but inextricable confusion. So the 
coming of love upon Iseult, as she sails over 



112 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

the sea with Tristram, takes this magnificent 
comparison : 

And as the august great blossom of the dawn 
Burst, and the full sun scarce from sea withdrawn 
Seemed on the fiery water a flower afloat, 
So as a fire the mighty morning smote 
Throughout her, and incensed with the influent hour 
Her whole soul's one great mystical red flower 
Burst. . . . 

Further on the long confession of her passion at 
Tintagel, while Tristram has gone over-sea to that 
other Iseult, will be broken by those thundering 
couplets : 

And swordlike was the sound of the iron wind, 
And as a breaking battle was the sea. 

But even to allude to all the passages of this 
kind in the poem — the swimming of Tristram, his 
rowing, and the other scenes — would fill an essay. 
In the end it must be confessed that this monotony 
of tone grows fatiguing. The rhythmic grace of 
the metre is like a bubble blown into the air, 
floating before our eyes with gorgeous iridescence 
— but when it touches earth, it bursts. There lies 
the fatal weakness of all this frenzy over liberty 
and this hymeneal chanting of sky and ocean; it 
has no basis in the homely facts of the heart. 
Read the account of Tristram and Iseult in the 
wilderness bower; it is all very beautiful, but you 
wonder why it leaves you so cold. There is not 
a single detail to fix an image of the place in the 



SWINBURNE 113 

mind, not a word to denote that we are dealing 
with the passion of individual human beings. 
Then turn to the same episode in the old poem of 
Gottfried von Strassburg; read the scene where 
the forsaken King Mark, through a window of 
their forest grotto, beholds the lovers lying asleep 
with the sword of Tristram stretched between 
them: 

He gazed on his heart's delight, Iseult, and deemed 
that never before had he seen her so fair. She lay sleep- 
ing, with a flush as of mingled roses on her cheek, and 
her red and glowing lips apart ; a little heated by her 
morning wandering in the dewy meadow and by the 
spring. On her head was a chaplet woven of clover. A 
ray of sunlight from the little window fell upon her face, 
and as Mark looked upon her he longed to kiss her, for 
never had she seemed so fair and so lovable as now. 
And when he saw how the sunlight fell upon her he 
feared lest it harm her, or awaken her, so he took grass 
and leaves and flowers, and covered the window there- 
with, and spake a blessing on his love and commended 
her to God, and went his way, weeping. 

It is good to walk with head lifted to the stars, 
but it is good also to have the feet well planted on 
earth. If another example of Swinburne's ab- 
straction from human interest were desired, one 
might take that rhapsody of the wind-beaten 
waters and "land that is lonelier than ruin," 
called By the North Sea. The picture of desolate 
and barren waste is one of the most powerful 
creations in his later works (it was published in 

VOL. III.— 8 



114 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

1880), yet there is still something wanting to 
stamp the impression into the mind. You turn 
from it, perhaps, to Browning's similar descrip- 
tion in Childe Roland and the reason is at once 
clear. You come upon the line: "One .stiff, blind 
horse, his every bone a-stare," and pause. There 
is in Swinburne's poem no single touch which ar- 
rests the attention in this way, concentrating the 
effect, as it were, to a burning point, and bringing 
out the symbolic relation to human life. Yet I 
cannot pass from this subject without noticing 
what may appear a paradoxical phase of Swin- 
burne's character. Only when he lowers his gaze 
from the furies and ecstasies of man's ambition to 
the instinctive ways of little children does his art 
become purely human. It would be easy to select 
a full dozen of the poems dealing with child-life 
and the tender love inspired by a child that touch 
the heart with their pure and chastened beauty. 
I should feel that an essential element of his art 
were left unremarked if I failed to quote some such 
examples as these two roundels on First Footsteps 
and a A Baby s Death : 

A little way, more soft and sweet 

Than fields aflower with May, 
A babe's feet, venturing, scarce complete 

A little way. 

Eyes full of dawning day 

Look up for mother's eyes to meet, 
Too blithe for song to say. 



SWINBURNE 115 

Glad as the golden spring to greet 

Its first live leaflet's play, 
Love, laughing, leads the little feet 

A little way. 



The little feet that never trod 
Earth, never strayed in field or street. 
What hand leads upward back to God 
The little feet? 

A rose in June's most honied heat, 
When life makes keen the kindling sod, 
Was not more soft and warm and sweet. 

Their pilgrimage's period 
A few swift moons have seen complete 
Since mother's hands first clasped and shod 
The little feet. 

Despite the artificiality of the French form and a 
kind of revolving dizziness of movement, one 
catches in these child-lyrics a simplicity of feeling 
not unlike Longfellow's cry, "O little feet ! that 
such long years." Swinburne himself might not 
relish the comparison, which is none the less just. 
It is not often safe to attempt to sum up a large 
body of work in a phrase, yet with Swinburne we 
shall scarcely go astray if we seek such a charac- 
terisation in the one word motion. Both the 
beauty and the fault of his extraordinary rhythms 
are exposed in that term, and certainly his first 
claim to originality lies in his rhythmical innova- 
tions. There had been nothing in English com- 
parable to the steady swell, like the waves of a 



Il6 SHEl.BURNE ESSAYS 

subsiding sea, in the lines of Atalanta and the 
Poems and Ballads. They brought a new sensu- 
ous pleasure into our poetry. But with time this 
cadenced movement developed into a kind of 
giddy race which too often left the reader belated 
and breathless. Little tricks of composition, such 
as a repeated caesura after the seventh syllable 
of the pentameter, were employed to heighten the 
speed. Moreover, the longer lines in many of the 
poems are not organic, but consist of two or more 
short lines huddled together, the effect being to 
eliminate the natural resting-places afforded by 
the sense. And occasionally his metre is merely 
wanton. He uses one verse, for example, which 
with its combination of gliding motion and in- 
ternal jingles is uncommonly irritating: 

Hills and valleys where April rallies his radiant squadron 

of flowers and birds, 
Steep strange beaches and lustrous reaches of fluctuant 

sea that the land engirds, 
Fields and downs that the sunrise crowns with life 

diviner than lives in words, — 

a page of this sets the nerves all a-j angle. 

And if Swinburne is one of the obscurest of 
English poets, it is due in large part to this same 
element of motion. A poem may move swiftly 
and still be perfectly easy to follow, so long as 
the thought is simple and concrete; witness the 
works of Ivongfellow. Or, on the other hand, the 
thought may be tortuous and still invite reflection^ 



SWINBURNE 117 

SO long as the metre forces a continual pause in 
the reading; witness Browning. Now, no one 
will accuse Swinburne of overloading his pages 
with thought; it is not there the obscurity lies. 
The difficulty is with the number and the pecul- 
iarly vague quality of his metaphors. lyCt me il- 
lustrate what I mean by this vagueness. I open 
one of the volumes at random and my eye rests 
on this line in A Channel Passage : 

As a tune that is played by the fingers of death on the 
keys of life or of sleep. 

If one were reading the poem and tried to evoke 
this image before his mind, he would certainly 
need to pause for a moment. Or I open to Walter 
Savage Landor and find this passage marked: 

High from his throne in heaven Simonides, 
Crowned with mild aureole of memorial tears 

That the everlasting sun of all time sees 
All golden, molten from the forge of years. 

The sentiment is simple enough, and it might be 
sufficient to feel the force of this in a general way, 
were it not that the metaphorical expression al- 
most compels one to pause and form an image of 
the whole before proceeding. Such an image is, 
no doubt, possible; but the mingling of abstract 
and concrete terms makes the act of visualisation 
slow and painful. At the same time the rhythm 
is swift and continuous, so that any pause in the 
reading demands a deliberate effort of the will. 



Il8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

The result is a form of obscurity which in many 
of the poems is almost prohibitive for an indolent 
man — and are not the best readers always a little 
indolent ? And there is another habit — trick, one 
might say — which increases this vagueness of 
metaphor in a curious manner. Constantly he 
uses a word in its ordinary, direct sense and then 
repeats it as an abstract personification. I find 
an example to hand in the stanzas written At a 
Dog's Grave : 

The shadow shed round those we love shines bright 
As lovers own face. 

It is only a mannerism such as another, but it 
recurs with sufiicieut frequency to have an ap- 
preciable effect on the mind. 

Indeed, if this vagueness of imagery were only 
an occasional appearance, the difficulty would be 
slight. As a matter of fact, no inconsiderable 
portion of Swinburne's work is made up of a 
stream of half-visualised abstractions that crowd 
upon one another with the motion of clouds 
driven below the moon. He is more like Walt 
"Whitman in this respect than any other poet in 
the language. Whitman is concrete and human 
and very earthly, but, with this difference, there 
is in both writers the same thronging procession 
of images which flit by without allowing the 
reader to concentrate his attention upon a single 
impression- they are both poets of vast and con- 
fused motion. Swinburne is notable for his want 



SWINBURNE 119 

of humour, yet lie is keen enough to see how 
close this flux of high-sounding words lies to the 
absurd. In the present collected edition of his 
poems he has included The Heptalogia, or Seven 
against Sense, a series of parodies which does not 
spare his own mannerisms. Some scandalised 
Philistines, I doubt, might even need to be told 
that Nephelidia was a parody: 

Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous 
touch on the temples of terror, 
Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the 
dead who is dumb ac the dust-heaps of death: 
Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emo- 
tional exquisite error. 
Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by 
beatitude's breath. 

Pretty much all the traits of Swinburne's style 
are there — the long breathless lines with their 
flowing dactyls or anapaests, the unabashed allit- 
eration, the stream of half-visualised images, the 
trick of following an epithet with its own abstract 
substantive, the sense of motion, and above all the 
accumulation of words. Of this last trait of ver- 
bosity I have said nothing, for the reason that it 
is too notorious to need mentioning. It may not, 
however, be superfluous to point out a little more 
precisely the special form his tautology assumes. 
He is never more graphic and nearer to nature 
than when he describes the ecstasy of swimming 
at sea. He is himself passionately fond of the 
exercise, and once at least was almost drowned iu 



I20 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

the Channel. Let us take, then, a stanza from 
A Swimmer' s Dream. : 

All the strength of the waves that perish 

Swells beneath me and laughs and sighs, 
Sighs for love of the life they cherish, 

Laughs to know that it lives and dies, 
Dies for joy of its life, and lives 
Thrilled with joy that its brief death gives — 
Death whose laugh or whose breath forgives 
Change that bids it subside and rise. 

Pass the fault of beginning with the abstraction 
"strength" — the first two lines are graphic and 
reproduce a real sensation; the second two lines 
are an explanatory repetition; the last four dis- 
solve both image and emotion into a flood of 
words. It is the common procedure in the later 
poems; it renders the regular dramas (with the 
exception of the earlier Chastelard) almost intoler- 
ably tedious. 

And what is the impression of the man him- 
self that remains after living with his works for 
several months ? The frankness with which he 
parodies his own eccentricities might seem to 
indicate a becoming modestj', and 3'et that is 
scarcely the word that rises first to the lips. In- 
deed, when I read in the very opening of the 
Dedicatory Epistle that precedes the present edi- 
tion of his poems such a statement as that "he 
finds nothing that he could wish to cancel, to 
alter, or to unsay, in zxiy page he has ever laid 
before his reader," I was prepared for a character 
quite the contrary of modest, and as I turned page 



SWINBURNE 121 

after page, there became fixed in my mind a feel- 
ing that I should hesitate to call personal repul- 
sion — a feeling of annoj^auce at least, for which 
no explanation was present. Only when I 
reached Atalayita in Calydon, in the fourth vol- 
ume, did the reason of this become evident. That 
poem, exquisite in many ways, is filled with talk 
of time and gods, of love and hate, of life and 
death, of all high-sounding words that lend gravity 
to poetry, and yet in the end it is itself light and 
not grave. The very needless reiteration of these 
words, their bandying from verse to verse, de- 
prives them of impressiveness. No, a true poet 
who respects the sacredness of noble ideas, who 
cherishes some awe for the mysteries, does not 
buffet them about as a shuttlecock; he uses them 
sparingly and only when the thought rises of 
necessit}^ to those heights. There is a lack of 
emotional breeding, almost an indecency, in Swin- 
burne's easy familiarity with these great things 
of the spirit. 

And this judgment is confirmed by turning to 
his prose. I trust it is not prejudice, but after a 
while the vociferous and endless praise of Victor 
Hugo in his essays had a curious effect upon me. 
I began to ask: Is the critic really thinking of 
Hugo alone, or is half of this frenzied adulation 
meant for his own artistic methods ? "Malignity 
and meanness, platitude and perversity, decrepi- 
tude of cankered intelligence and desperation of 
universal rancor," he exclaims against Sainte- 



122 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

Beuve; and over the other critics of his idol he 
cries out, "The lazy malignity of envious dullness 
is as false and fatuous as it is common and easy. ' ' 
Can one avoid the surmise that he has more than 
Hugo to avenge in such tirades ? It is the same 
with ever)^ one who is opposed to his own notions 
of art. Of Walt Whitman it is: "The dirty, 
clumsy paws of a harper whose plectrum is a 
muckrake." Of a French classicist: "It is the 
business of a Nisard to pass judgment and to 
bray." And of those who intimate (he is osten- 
sibly defending Rossetti) that beauty and power 
of expression can accord with emptiness or ster- 
ility of matter: " This flattering unction the very 
foolishest of malignants will hardly in this case be 
able to lay upon the corrosive sore which he calls 
his soul." Sometimes, I admit, this manner of 
invective rises to a sublimity of fury that sounds 
like nothing so much as a combination of Carlyle 
and Shelley. For example: " The affection was 
never so serious as to make it possible for the most 
malignant imbecile to compare or to confound him 
[Jowett] with such morally and spiritually typical 
and unmistakable apes of the Dead Sea as Mark 
Pattison, or such renascent blossoms of the 
Italian renascence as the Platonic amorist of 
blue-breeched gondoliers who is now in Aretino's 
bosom." It 's not criticism; it 's not fair to Mark 
Pattison or to John Addington Symonds, but it is 
sublime. It is a storm of wind only, but it leaves 
a devastated track. 



SWINBURNE 123 

Enough has been said to indicate the trait of 
character that prevails through these pages of 
eulogy and vituperation. It is not nice to apply 
so crass a word as conceit to one who undoubtedly 
belongs to the immortals of our pantheon, yet the 
expression forces itself upon me. Listen to an- 
other of his outbursts, this time against Matthew 
Arnold: "His inveterate and invincible Philistin- 
ism, his full community of spirit and faith, in cer- 
tain things of import, with the vulgarest English 
mind!" Does not the quality begin to define 
itself more exactly ? There is a phrase they use 
in France, ipater le bourgeois, of those artistic 
souls who contrast themselves by a kind of in- 
effable contempt with commonplace humanitj', 
and who take pleasure in tweaking the nose, so 
to speak, of the amiable plebeian. Have a care, 
gentlemen ! The Philistine has a curious trick of 
revengiug himself in the long run. For my own 
part, when it comes to a breach between the poeti- 
cal and the prosaic, I take my place submissively 
with the latter. There is at least a humble safety 
in retaining one's pleasure in certain things of 
import with the vulgarest English mind, and if it 
were obligatory to choose between them (as, hap- 
pily, it is not) I would surrender the wind-swept 
rhapsodies of Swinburne for the homely conversa- 
tion of Whittier. 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 

Probabi^y the first impression one gets from 
reading the Complete Poetical Works of Christina 
Rossetti, now collected and edited by her brother, 
Mr. W. M, Rossetti,' is that she wrote altogether 
too much, and that it was a doubtful service to 
her memory to preserve so many poems purely 
private in their nature. The editor, one thinks, 
might well have shown himself more " reverent 
of her strange simplicity." For page after page 
we are in the society of a spirit always refined 
and exquisite in sentiment, but without any 
guiding and restraining artistic impulse ; she 
never drew to the shutters of her soul, but lay 
open to every wandering breath of heaven. In 
comparison with the works of the more creative 
poets her song is like the continuous lisping of an 
seolian harp beside the music elicited by cunning 
fingers. And then, suddenly, out of this sweet 
monotony, moved by some stronger, clearer breeze 
of inspiration, there sounds a strain of wonderful 
beauty and flawless perfection, unmatched in its 
own kind in English letters. An anonymous 

' The Poetical Works oj Christina Georgina Rossetti. 
With Memoir and Notes, etc. By William Michael Ros- 
setti. New York : The Macmillau Co., 1904. 

124 



CHRISTINA ROSSETII 125 

purveyor of anecdotes has recentlj' told how one 
of these more exquisite songs called forth the 
enthusiasm of Swinburne. It was just aiter the 
publication of Goblin Market and Other Poems, 
and in a little company of friends that erratic 
poet and critic started to read aloud from the 
volume. Turning first to the devotional para- 
phrase which begins with " Passing away, saith 
the World, passing away," he chanted the lines 
in his own emphatic manner, then laid the book 
down with a vehement gesture. Presently he 
took it up again, and a second time read the poem 
through, even more impressively. " By God ! " 
he exclaimed at the end, " that 's one of the finest 
things ever written! " 

Passing away, saitli the World, passing away : 

Chances, beauty, and youth, sapped day by day, 

Thy life never continueth in one stay. 

Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey, 

That hath won neither laurel nor bay ? 

I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May : 

Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay 

On my bosom for aye. 

Then I answered: Yea. 

Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away : 

With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play, 

Hearken what the past doth witness and say : 

Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array, 

A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay. 

At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day 

Lo the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay ; 

Watch thou and pray. 

Then I answered : Yea. 



126 SHELBURXE ESSAYS 

Passing away, saith my God, passing away : 

Winter passeth after the long delay : 

New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray, 

Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May. 

Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray 5 

Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day : 

My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say. 

Then I answered : Yea, 

And Swinburne, somewhat contrary to his 
wont, was right. Purer inspiration, less troubled 
by worldly motives, than these verses cannot be 
found. Nor would it be difiScult to discover in 
their brief compass most of the qualities that lend 
distinction to Christina Rossetti's work. Even 
her monotone, which after long continuation be- 
comes monotony, affects one here as a subtle de- 
vice heightening the note of subdued fervour and 
religious resignation; the repetition of the rhym- 
ing vowel creates the feeling of a secret expec- 
tancy cherished through the weariness of a 
frustrate life. If there is any excuse for publish- 
ing the many poems that express the mere 
unlifted, unvaried prayer of her heart, it is be- 
cause their monotony may prepare the mind for 
the strange artifice of this solemn chant. But 
such a preparation demands more patience than 
a poet may justly claim from the ordinary- reader. 
Better would be a volume of selections from her 
works, including a number of poems of this char- 
acter. It would stand, in its own way, supreme 
in English literature, — as pure and fine an ex- 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 12/ 

pression of the feminine genius as the world has 
5-et heard. 

It is, indeed, as the flower of strictly feminine 
genius that Christina Rossetti should be read and 
judged. She is one of a group of women who 
brought this new note into Victorian poetry, — 
Louisa Shore, Jean Ingelow, rareh- Mrs. Brown- 
ing, and, I may add, Mrs. Meynell. She is like 
them, but of a higher, finer strain than they 
(^xaXai 6i t£ rrdffai), and I always think of her 
as of her brother's Blessed Damozel, circled with 
a company of singers, yet holding herself aloof in 
chosen loneliness of passion. She, too, has not 
quite ceased to yearn toward earth: 

And still she bowed herself and stooped 

Out of the circling chsinn ; 
Until her bosom must have made 

The bar she leaned on warm, 
And the lilies lay as if asleep 

Along her bended arm. 

I have likened the artlessness of much of her 
writing to the sweet monotony of an aeolian harp; 
the comparison returns as expressing also the 
purely feminine spirit of her inspiration. There 
is in her a passive surrender to the powers of life, 
a rehgious acquiescence, which wavers between a 
plaintive pathos and a sublime exultation of faith. 
The great world, with its harsh indifference for 
the weak, passes over her as a ruinous gale rushes 
over a sequestered wood-flower; she bows her 



128 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

head, humbled but not broken, nor ever forgetful 
of her gentle mission, — 

And strong in patient weakness till the end. 

She bends to the storm, yet no one, not the great 
mystics nor the greater poets who cry out upon 
the sound and fury of life, is more constantly im- 
pressed by the vanity and fleeting insignificance of 
the blustering power, or more persistently looks 
for consolation and joy from another source. But 
there is a difierence. Read the masculine poets 
who have heard this mystic call of the spirit, and 
you feel yourself in the presence of a strong will 
that has grasped the world, and, finding it in- 
suflBcient, deliberately casts it away; and there is 
no room for pathetic regret in their ruthless deter- 
mination to renounce. But this womanly poet 
does not properly renounce at all, she passively 
allows the world to glide away from her. The 
strength of her genius is endurance: 

She stands there like a beacon through the night, 
A pale clear beacon where the storm-drift is — 

She stands alone, a wonder deathly-white: 

She stands there patient, nerved with inner might, 
Indomitable in her feebleness, 

Her face and will athirst against the light. 

It is characteristic of her feminine disposition 
that the loss of the world should have come to 
her first of all in the personal relatitm of love. 
And here we must signalise the chief service of the 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI I2g 

editor toward his sister. It was generally known 
in a vague way, indeed it was easy to surmise as 
much from her published work, that Christina 
Rossetti bore with her alwaj^s the sadness of un- 
fulfilled aflfection. In the introductory Memoir 
her brother has now given a sufficiently detailed 
account of this matter to remove all ambiguity. 
I am not one to wish that the reserves and secret 
emotions of an author should be displayed for the 
mere gratification of the curious; but in this case 
the revelation would seem to be justified as a 
needed explanation of poems which she herself 
was willing to publish. Twice, it appears, she 
gave her love, and both times drew back in a 
kind of tremulous awe from the last step. The 
first aflfair began in 1848, before she was eighteen, 
and ran its course in about two 3'ears. The man 
was one James Collinson, an artist of mediocre 
talent who had connected himself with the Pre- 
raphaelite Brotherhood. He was originally a 
Protestant, but had become a Roman Catholic. 
Then, as Christina refused to ally herself to one 
of that faith, he compliantly abandoned Rome for 
the Church of England. His conscience, how- 
ever, which seems from all accounts to have been 
of a flabby consistency, troubled him in the new 
faith, and he soon reverted to Catholicism. 
Christina then drew back from him finally. It is 
not so easy to understand why she refused the 
second suitor, with w^hom she became intimately 
acquainted about i860, and whom she loved in 

VOL. III. — Q. 



I30 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

her own retiring fashion until the day of her 
death. This was Charles Bagot Cayley, a brother 
of the famous Cambridge mathematician, himself 
a scholar and in a small way a poet. Some idea 
of the man may be obtained from a notice of him 
written by Mr. W. M. Rossetti for the AthencBian 
after his death. "A more complete specimen than 
Mr. Charles Cayley," says Mr. Rossetti, "of the 
abstracted scholar in appearance and manner — 
the scholar who constantly lives an inward and 
unmaterial life, faintly perceptive of external facts 
and appearances — could hardly be conceived. He 
united great sweetness to great simplicity of char- 
acter, and was not less polite than unworldly." 
One might suppose that such a temperament was 
peculiarly fitted to join with that of the secluded 
poetess, and so, to judge from her many love 
poems, it actually was. Of her own heart or of 
his there seems to have been no doubt in her 
mind. Even in her most rapturous visions of 
heaven, like the yearning cry of the Blessed Da- 
mozel, the memory of that stilled passion often 
breaks out: 

How should I rest in Paradise, 
Or sit ou steps of heaven alone ? 
If Saints and Angels spoke of love, 
Should I not answer from my throne. 
Have pity upon me, ye my friends, 
For I have heard the sound thereof? 

She seeius even not to have been unfamiliar with 
the hope of joy, and I would persuade myself that 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI I3I 

her best-known lyric of gladness, " My heart is 
like a singing- bird," was inspired by the early 
dawning of this passion. But the hope and the 
joy soon passed away and left her onlj' the solemn 
refrain of acquiescence: " Then I answered: Yea." 
Her brother can give no sufficient explanation of 
this refusal on her part to accept the happiness 
almost within her hand, though he hints at lack 
of religious sympathy between the two. Some 
inner necessity of sorrow and resignation, one 
almost thinks, drew her back in both cases, some 
perception that the real treasure of her heart lay 
not in this world: 

A voice said, " Follow, follow " : and I rose 
And followed far into the dreamy night, 
Turning my back upon the pleasant light. 

It led me where the bluest water flows, 

And would not let me drink : where the corn grows 
I dared not pause, but went uncheered by sight 
Or touch : until at length in evil plight 

It left me, wearied out with many woes. 

Some time I sat as one bereft of sense : 
But soon another voice from very far 

Called, "Follow, follow" : and I rose again. 
Now on my night has dawned a blessed star : 

Kind steady hands my sinking steps sustain, 
And will not leave me till I go from hence. 

It might seem that here was a spirit of renun- 
ciation akin to that of the more masculine mys- 
tics; indeed, a great many of her poems are, 
unconsciously I presume, almost a paraphrase of 
that recurring theme of the Imitation: " Nolle 



132 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

consolari ab aliqua creatura," and again : ** Amore 
igitur Great oris, amorem hominis superavit; et 
pro humano solatio, divinum beneplacitum magis 
elegit," She, too, was unwilling to find consola- 
tion in any creature, and turned from the love of 
man to the love of the Creator; yet a little read- 
ing of her exquisite hymns will show that this 
renunciation has more the nature of surrender 
than of deliberate choice: 

He broke my will from day to day ; 
He read my yearnings unesprest, 
And said them nay. 

The world is withheld from her by a power above 
her will, and always this power stands before her 
in that peculiarly personal form which it is wont 
to assume in the feminine mind. Her faith is a 
mere transference to heaven of a love that terrifies 
her in its ruthless earthly manifestation; and the 
passion of her life is henceforth a ^'earning ex- 
pectation of the hour when the Bridegroom shall 
come and she shall answer, Yea, Nor is the 
earthly source of this love forgotten; it abides 
with her as a dream which often is not easily 
distinguished from its celestial transmutation; 

O dream bow sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet, 
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise, 

"Where souls brimful of love abide and meet ; 
Where thirsting longing eyes 
Watch the slow door 

That opening, letting in, lets out no more. 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 1 33 

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live 
My very life again though cold in death : 

Come back to me in dreams, that I may give 
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath : 
Speak low, lean low, 

As long ago, my love, how long ago. 

It is this perfectly passive attitude toward the 
powers that commaud her heart and her soul — a 
passivity which by its completeness assumes the 
misguiding semblance of a deliberate determina- 
tion of life — that makes her to me the purest ex- 
pression in English of the feminine genius. I 
know that man)^ would think this pre-eminence 
belongs to Mrs. Browning. They would point 
out the narrowness of Christina Rossetti's range, 
and the larger aspects of woman's nature, neg- 
lected by her, which inspire some of her rival's 
best-known poems. To me, on the contrary, it 
is the very scope attempted bj^ Mrs. Browning 
that prevents her from holding the place I would 
give to Christina Rossetti. So much of Mrs. 
Browning — her political ideas, her passion for 
reform, her scholarship — simply carries her into 
the sphere of the masculine poets, where she suf- 
fers by an unfair comparison. She would be a 
better and less irritating \vriter without these 
excursions into a field for wdiich she was not 
entirely fitted. The uncouthness that so often 
mars her language is partly due to an unrecon- 
ciled feud between her intellect and her heart. 
She had neither a woman's wise passivity nor a 



134 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

man's controlling will. Even within the range 
of strictly feminine powers her genius is not 
simple and typical. And here I must take refuge 
in a paradox which is like enough to carry but 
little conviction. Nevertheless, it is the truth. I 
mean to say that probably most women will re- 
gard Mrs. Browning as the better type of their 
sex, whereas to men the honour will seem to be- 
long to Miss Rossetti; and that the judgment of a 
man in this matter is more conclusive than a 
woman's. This is a paradox, I admit, yet its 
solution is simple. Women will judge a poetess 
by her inclusion of the larger human nature, and 
will resent the limiting of her range to the quali- 
ties that we look upon as peculiarly feminine. 
The passion of Mrs. Browning, her attempt to 
control her inspiration to the demands of a shap- 
ing intellect, her questioning and answering, her 
larger aims, in a word her effort to create, — all 
these will be set down to her credit by women 
who are as appreciative of such qualities as men, 
and who will not be annoyed by the false tone 
running through them. Men, on the contrary, 
are apt, in accepting a woman's work or in creat- 
ing a female character, to be interested more ia 
the traits and limitations which distinguish her 
from her masculine complement. They care 
more for the idea of woman, and less for woman 
as merely a human being. Thus, for example, I 
should not hesitate to say that in this ideal aspect 
Thackeray's heroines are more womanly than 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI I35 

George Eliot's, — though I am aware of the ridi- 
cule to which such an opinion lays me open; and 
for the same reason I hold that Christina Rossetti 
is a more complete exemplar of feminine genius, 
and, as being more perfect in her own sphere, a 
better poet than Mrs. Browning. That discon- 
certing sneer of Edward FitzGerald's, which so 
enraged Robert Browning, would never have oc- 
curred to him, I think, in the case of Miss Ros- 
setti. 

There is a curious comment on this contrast in 
the introduction to Christina Rossetti' s Monna 
Innominata, a sonnet- sequence in which she tells 
her own story in the supposed person of an early 
Italian lady. " Had the great poetess of our own 
day and nation," she sa3\s, " only been unhappy 
instead of happy, her circumstances would have 
invited her to bequeath to us, in lieu of the Portu- 
guese Sonnets, an inimitable ' donna innominata ' 
drawn not from fancy, but from feeling, and 
worthy to occupy a niche beside Beatrice and 
Laura." Now this sonnet-sequence of Miss Ros- 
setti' s is far from her best work, and holds a lower 
rank in every way than that passionate self- 
revelation of Mrs. Browning's ; yet to read these 
confessions of the two poets together is a good 
way to get at the division between their spirits. 
In Miss Rossetti's sonnets all those feminine traits 
I have dwelt on are present to a marked, almost 
an exaggerated, degree. They are harmonious 
within themselves, and filled with a quiet ease ; 



136 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

only the higher inspiration is lacking to them in 
comparison with her Passing Away, and other 
great lyrics. In Mrs. Browning, on the contrary, 
one cannot but feel a disturbing element. The 
\'ery tortuousness of her language, the straining 
to render her emotion in terms of the intellect, 
introduces a quality which is out of harmony with 
the ground theme of feminine surrender. More 
than that, this submission to love, if looked at 
more closely, is itself in large part such as might 
proceed from a man as well as from a woman, so 
that there results an annoying confusion of mas- 
culine and feminine passion. Take, for instance, 
the twenty-second of the Portuguese So7inets^ one 
of the most perfect in the series : 

When our two souls stand up erect and strong, 

Face to face, drawing nigher and nigher, 

Until the lengthening wings break into fire 

At either curved point,— What bitter wrong 

Can earth do to us, that we should not long 

Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher, 

The angels would press on us, and aspire 

To drop some golden orb of perfect song 

Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay 

Rather on earth. Beloved,— where the unfit 

Contrarious moods of men recoil away 

And isolate pure spirits, and permit 

A place to stand and love in for a day. 

With darkness and the death-hour rounding it. 

That is noble verse, undoubtedly. The point is 
that it might just as well have been written by a 



CHRlSTIxNTA ROSSETTI 1 37 

man to a woman as the contrary; it would, for 
example, fit perfectly well into Dante Gabriel 
Rossetti's House of Life. There is here no pas- 
sivity of soul; the passion is not that of acquies- 
cence, but of determination to press to the quick 
of love. Only, perhaps, a certain falsetto in the 
tone (if the meaning of that word may be so ex- 
tended) shows that, after all, it was written by a 
woman, who in adopting the masculine pitch 
loses something of fineness and exquisiteness. 

A single phrase of the sonnet, that " deep, 
dear silence," links it in my mind with one of 
Christina Rossetti's not found in the Mojina 
Innominata, but expressing the same spirit of 
resignation. It is entitled simply Rest : 

O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes ; 

Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching. Earth ; 

Ivie close around her ; leave no room for mirth 
With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs. 
She hath no questions, she hath no replies, 

Hushed in and curtained with a blessed dearth 

Of all that irked her from the hour of birth ; 
With stillness that is almost Paradise. 
Darkness more clear thati noonday holdeth her. 

Silence more musical than any song ; 
Even her very heart has ceased to stir : 
Until the morning of Eternity 
Her rest shall not begin nor end, but be ; 

And when she wakes she will not think it long. 

Am I misguided in thinking that in this stillness, 
this silence more musical than any song, the 



138 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

feminine heart speaks with a simplicity and con- 
summate purity such as I quite fail to hear in the 
Portuguese Somiets, admired as those sonnets are ? 
Nor could one, perhaps, find in all Christina Ros- 
setti's poems a single line that better expresses the 
character of her genius than these magical words: 
" With stillness that is almost Paradise." That 
is the mood which, with the passing away of love, 
never leaves her; that is her religion; her acquies- 
cent Yea, to the world and the soul and to God. 
Into that region of rapt stillness it seems almost 
a sacrilege to penetrate with inquisitive, critical 
mind; it is like tearing away the veil of modesty. 
I will not attempt to bring out the beauty of 
her mood by comparing it with that of the more 
masculine quietists, who reach out and take the 
kingdom of Heaven by storm, and whose prayer 
is, in the words of Tennyson : 

Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine. 

It will be better to quote one other poem, perhaps 
her most perfect work artistically, and to pass on: 

UP-HIlvI, 

Does the road wind up-hill all the way ? 

Yes, to the very end. 
Will the day's journey take the whole long day ? 

From morn to night, my friend. 

But is there for the night a resting-place? 

A roof for when the slow dark hours begin. 
May not the darkness hide it from my face? 

You cannot miss that iuu. 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 1 39 

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night ? 

Those who have gone before. 
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight? 

They will not keep you standing at that door. 

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? 

Of labour you shall find the sum. 
Will there be beds for me and all who seek ? 

Yea, beds for all who come. 

The culmination of her pathetic weariness is 
always this cry for rest, a cry for supreme acqui- 
escence in the will of Heaven, troubled by no 
personal volition, no desire, no emotion, save 
only love that waits for blessed absorption. Her 
latter years became what St. Teresa called a long 
" prayer of quiet ' ' ; and her brother's record of her 
secluded life in the refuge of his home, and later 
in her own house on Torrington Square, reads like 
the saintly story of a cloistered nun. It might 
be said of her, as of one of the fathers, that she 
needed not to pray, for her life was an unbroken 
communion with God. And yet that is not all. 
It is a sign of her utter womanliness that envy for 
the common affections of life was never quite 
crushed in her heart. Now and then through 
this monotony of resignation there wells up a sob 
of complaint, a note not easy, indeed, to distin- 
guish from that amari aliqiud of jealousy, which 
Thackeray, cynically, as some think, always left 
at the bottom of his gentlest feminine characters. 
The fullest expression of this feeling is in one 
of her longer poems, The Lowest Rootn, which 



I40 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

contrasts the life of two sisters, one of whom 
chooses the ordinary lot of woman with home 
and husband and children, while the other learns, 
year after tedious year, the consolation of lonely 
patience. The spirit of the poem is not entirely 
pleasant. The resurgence of personal envy is a 
little disconcerting; and the only comfort to be 
derived from it is the proof that under different 
circumstances Christina Rossetti might have given 
expression to the more ordinary lot of contented 
womanhood as perfectly as she sings the pathos 
and hope of the cloistered life. Had that first 
voice, which led her "where the bluest water 
flows," suffered her also to quench the thirst of 
her heart, had not that second voice summoned 
her to follow, this might have been. But Htera- 
ture, I think, would have lost in her gain. As it 
is, we must recognise that the vision of fulfilled 
affection and of quiet home joys still troubled her, 
in her darker hours, with a feeling of enibittered 
regret. Two or three of the stanzas of The Lowest 
Room even evoke a reminiscence of that scene in 
Thomson's City of Dreadful Night, where the 
" shrill and lamentable cry " breaks through the 
silence of the shadowy congregation: 

In all eternity I liad one chance. 

One few years' term of gracious human life, 

The splendours of the intellect's advance, 

The sweetness of the home with babes and wife. 

But if occasionally this residue of bitterness m 
Christina Rossetti recalls the more acrid genius 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI I4I 

of James Thomson, 5'et a comparison of the two 
poets (and such a comparison is not fantastic, 
however unexpected it may appear) would set the 
feminine character of our subject in a peculiarly- 
vivid light. Both were profoundly moved by the 
evanescence of life, by the deceitful ness of pleas- 
ure, while both at times, Thomson almost con- 
tinually, were troubled by the apparent content 
of those who rested in these joys of the world. 
Both looked forward longingly to the consumma- 
tion of peace. In his call to Our Lady of Oblivion 
Thomson might seem to be speaking for both, 
only in a more deliberately metaphorical style: 

Take me. and lull me into perfect sleep ; 

Down, down, far hidden in thy duskiest cave ; 
While all the clamorous years above me sweep 

Unheard, or, like the voice of seas that rave 
On far-off coasts, but murmuring o'er my trance, 
A dim vast monotone, that shall enhance 

The restful rapture of the inviolate grave. 

But the roads bj^ which the two would reach this 
"silence more musical than any song" were 
utterly different. With an intellect at once 
mathematical and constructive, Thomson built 
out of his personal bitterness and despair a uni- 
verse corresponding to his own mood, a philosophy 
of atheistic revolt. I,ike Lucretius, " he denied 
divinely the divine." In that tremendous con- 
versation on the river- walk he represents one soul 
as protesting to another that not for all his misery 
would he carry the guilt of creating such a 



142 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

world; whereto the second replies, and it is the 
poet himself who speaks: 

The world rolls round forever as a mill ; 

It grinds out death and life and good and ill; 

It has no purpose, heart or mind or will, . . . 

Man might know one thing were his sight less dim ; 
That it whirls not to suit his petty whim, 
That it is quite indiflferent to him. 

There is the voluntary ecstasy of the saints, there 
is also this stern and self-willed rebellion, and, 
contrasted with them both, as woman is con- 
trasted with man, there is the acquiescence of 
Christina Rossetti and of the little group of writers 
whom she leads in spirit : 

Passing away, saith the World, passing away. . . . 
Then I answered : Yea. 



WHY IS BROWNING POPULAR? 

It has come to be a matter of course that some 
new book on Browning shall appear with every 
season. Already the number of these manuals 
has grown so large that any one interested in 
critical literature finds he must devote a whole 
corner of his library to them — where, the cynical 
may add, they are better lodged than in his brain. 
To name only a few of the more recent publica- 
tions: there was Stopford Brooke's volume, which 
partitioned the poet's philosophy into convenient 
compartments, labelled nature, human life, art, 
love, etc. Then came Mr. Chesterton, with his 
biting paradoxes and his bold justification of 
Browning's work, not as it ought to be, but as it 
is. Professor Dowden followed with what is, on 
the whole, the best vade mecuvi for those who wish 
to preserve their enthusiasm with a little salt of 
common sense; and, latest of all, we have now a 
critical study ' by Prof. C. H. Herford, of the 
University of Manchester, which once more un- 
rolls in all its gleaming aspects the poet's " joy in 
soul." Two things would seem to be clear from 
this succession of commentaries: Browning must 

' Robert Browning. By C. H. Herford. New York : 
Dodd, Mead & Co., 1905. 

143 



144 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

need a deal of exegesis, and he must be a subject 
of wide curiosity. Now obscurity and popularity 
do not commonly go together, and I fail to re- 
member that any of the critics named has paused 
long enough in his own admiration to explain 
just why Browning has caught the breath of 
favour; in a word, to answer the question: Why 
is Browning popular ? 

There is, indeed, one response to such a ques- 
tion, so obvious and so simple that it might well 
be taken for granted. It would hardly seem 
worth while to say that despite his difficulty 
Browning is esteemed because he has written 
great poetry; and in the most primitive and un- 
equivocal manner this is to a certain extent true. 
At intervals the staccato of his lines, like the 
drilling of a woodpecker, is interrupted by a burst 
of pure and liquid music, as if that vigorous and 
exploring bird were suddenly gifted with the 
melodious throat of the lark. It is not necessary 
to hunt curiously for examples of this power; 
they are fairly frequent and the best known are 
the most striking. Consider the first lines that 
sing themselves in the memory: 

O lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird, 
And all a wonder and a wild desire — 

there needs no cunning exegete to point out the 
beauty of these. Their rhythm is of the singing, 
traditional kind that is familiar to us in all the 
true poets of the language; the harmony of the 



BROWNING 145 

vowel sounds and of the consonants, the very 
trick of alliteration, are obvious to the least criti- 
cal; yet withal there is that miraculous suggestion 
in their charm which may be felt but cannot be 
converted into a prosaic equivalent. They stand 
out from the lines that precede and follow them 
in The Ring and the Book, as differing not so 
much in degree as in kind; the}' are lyrical, poeti- 
cal, in the midst of a passage which is neither 
lyrical nor, precisely speaking, poetical. Else- 
where the surprise may be on the lower plane of 
mere description. So, throughout the peroration 
oi Paracelsus, despite the glory and eloquence of 
the dying scholar's vision, one feels continually 
an alien element which just prevents a complete 
acquiescence in their magic, some residue of clog- 
ging analysis which has not quite been subdued 
to poetry — and then suddenly, as if some dis- 
cordant instrument were silenced in an orchestra 
and unvexed music floated to the ear, the manner 
changes, thus: 

The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts, 
A secret they assemble to discuss 
When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare 
Like grates of hell. 

And, take his works throughout, there is a 
good deal of this writing which has the ordinary, 
direct appeal to the emotions. Yet it is scattered, 
accidental so to speak; nor is it any pabulum of 
the soul as simple as this which converts the lover 

VOL. III.— 10. 



146 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

of poetry into the Browningite. Even his com- 
mon-sense admirers are probably held by some- 
thing more recondite than this occasional charm. 

You see one lad o'erstride a chimney-stack ; 

Him you must watch — he 's sure to fall, yet stands ! 

Our interest 's on the dangerous edge of things — 

says Bishop Blougram, and the attraction of 
Browning to many is just in watching what may 
be called his acrobatic psychology. Consider this 
same Bishop Blo7igram's Apology, in some respects 
the most characteristic, as it is certainly not the 
least prodigious, of his poems. " Over his wine 
so smiled and talked his hour Sylvester Blou- 
gram " — talked and smiled to a silent listener 
concerning the strange mixture of doubt and 
faith which lie snugly side by side in the mind of 
an ecclesiastic who is at once a hypocrite and a 
sincere believer in the Church. The mental atti- 
tude of the speaker is subtile enough in itself to 
be fascinating, but the real suspense does not lie 
there. The very balancing of the priest's argu- 
ment may at first work a kind of deception, but 
read more attentively and it begins to grow clear 
that no man in the wily bishop's predicament 
ever talked in this way over his wine or anywhere 
else. And here lies the real piquancy of the situ- 
ation. His words are something more than a 
confession; they are this and at the same time the 
poet's, or if you will the bishop's own, comment 
to himself on that confession. He who talks is 



BROWNING 147 

never quite in the privac)^ of solitude, nor is he 
ever quite conscious of his listener, who as a mat- 
ter of fact is not so much a person as some half- 
personified opinion of the world or abstract notion 
set against the character of the speaker. And 
this is Browning's regular procedure not only in 
those wonderful dramatic monologues, Men and 
Women, that form the heart of his work, but in 
Paracelsus, in The Ring and the Book, even in the 
songs and the formal dramas. 

Perhaps the most remarkable and most obvious 
example of this suspended psj^chology is to be 
found in The Ring and the Book. Take the canto 
in which Giuseppe Caponsacchi relates to the 
judges his share in the tangled story. It is clear 
that the interest here is not primarily in the event 
itself, nor does it lie in that phase of the speaker's 
character which would be revealed by his confes- 
sion before such a court as he is supposed to con- 
front. The fact is, that Caponsacchi's language 
is not such as under the circumstances he could 
possibly be conceived to use. As the situation 
forms itself in my mind, he might be in his cell 
awaiting the summons to appear. In that soli- 
tude and uncertainty he goes over in memory the 
days in Arezzo, when the temptation first came to 
him, and once more takes the perilous ride with 
Pompilia to Rome. He lives again through the 
great crisis, dissecting all his motives, balancing 
the pros and cons of each step; yet all the time 
he has in mind the opinion of the world as 



148 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

personified in the judges he is to face. The 
psychology is suspended dexterously between 
self-examination and open confession, and the 
reader who accepts the actual dramatic situation 
as suggested by Browning loses the finest and 
subtlest savour of the speech. In many places it 
would be simply preposterous to suppose we are 
listening to words really uttered by the priest. 



We did go on all night; but at its close 

She was troubled, restless, moaned low, talked at whiles 

To herself, her brow on quiver with the dream : 

Once, wide awake, she menaced, at arms' length 

Waved away something — " Never again with j-ou ! 

My soul is mine, my body is my soul's : 

You and I are divided ever more 

In soul and body : get you gone ! " Then I — 

" Why, in my whole life I have never prayed ! 

Oh, if the God, that ouly can, would help ! 

Am I his priest with power to cast out fiends ? 

Let God arise and all his enemies 

Be scattered ! " By mom, there was peace, no sigh 

Out of the deep sleep — 

no, those words were never spoken in the ears of 
a sceptical, worldly tribunal; they belong to the 
most sacred recesses of memory; yet at the same 
time that memory is coloured by a consciousness 
of the world's clumsy judgment. 

It would be exaggeration to say that all Brown- 
ing's greater poems proceed in this involved man- 
ner, yet the method is so constant as to be the 



BROWNING 149 

most significant feature of his work. And it 
bestows on him the honour of having created a 
new genre which follows neither the fashion of 
lyric on the one hand nor that of drama or nar- 
rative on the other, but is a curious and illusive 
hybrid of the two. The passions are not uttered 
directly as having validity and meaning in the 
heart of the speaker alone, nor are they revealed 
through action and reaction upon the emotions 
of another. His dramas, if read attentivel}^, will 
be found really to fall into the same mixed genre 
as his monologues. And a comparison of his 
Sordello with such a poem as Goethe's Tasso 
(which is more the dialogue of a narrative poem 
than a true drama) will show how far he fails to 
make a character move visibly amid opposing 
circumstances. In both poems we have a con- 
trast of the poetical temperament with the prac- 
tical world. In Browning it is difficult to distin- 
guish the poet's own thought from the words 
of the hero ; the narrative is in reality a long 
confession of Sordello to himself who is conscious 
of a hostile power without. In Goethe this 
hostile power stands out as distinctly as Tasso 
himself, and they act side by side each to his 
own end. 

There is even a certain significance in what is 
perhaps the most immediately personal poem 
Browning ever wrote, that One Word More which 
he appended to his Men and Women. Did he 
himself quite understand this lament for Raphael's 



I50 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

lost sonnets and Dante's interrupted angel, this 
desire to find his love a language, 

Fit and fair and simple and sufiBcieut — 

Using nature that 's an art to others, 

Not, this one time, art that 's turned his nature? 

It would seem rather the uneasiness of his own 
mind when brought face to face with strong feel- 
ing where no escape remains into his oblique mode 
of expression. And the man Browning of real 
life, with his training in a dissenting Camberwell 
home and later his somewhat dapper acceptance 
of the London social season, accords with such a 
view of the writer. It is, too, worthy of note that 
almost invariably he impressed those who first 
met him as being a successful merchant, a banker, 
a diplomat — anything but a poet. There was 
passion enough below the surface, as his outburst 
of rage against FitzGerald and other incidents of 
the kind declare; but the direct exhibition of it 
was painful if not grotesque. 

Yet in this matter, as in everything that touches 
Browning's psychology, it is well to proceed 
cautiously. Because he approached the emotions 
thus obliquely, as it were in a style hybrid be- 
tween the lyric and the drama, it does not follow 
that his work is void of emotion or that he ques- 
tioned the validity of human passion. The very 
contrary is true. I remember, indeed, once hear- 
ing a lady, whose taste was as frank as it was 
modern, say that she liked Browning better than 



BROWNING 151 

Shakespeare because he was more emotional and 
less intellectual than the older dramatist. Her 
distinction was somewhat confused, but it leads 
to an important consideration; I do not know but 
it points to the very heart of tlie question of 
Browning's popularity. He is not in reality more 
emotional than Shakespeare, but his emotion is 
of a kind more readily felt by the reader of to- 
day; nor does he require less use of the intellect, 
but he does demand less of that peculiar transla- 
tion of the intellect from the particular to the 
general point of view which is necessary to raise 
the reader into what may be called the poetical 
mood. In one sense Browning is nearly the most 
intellectual poet in the language. The action of 
his brain was so nimble, his seizure of every as- 
sociated idea was so quick and subtile, his ellipti- 
cal style is so supercilious of the reader's needs, 
that often to understand him is like following a 
long mathematical demonstration in which many 
of the intermediate equations are omitted. And 
then his very trick of approaching the emotions 
indirectly, his suspended psychology as I have 
called it, requires a peculiar flexibility of the 
reader's mind. But in a way these rough- 
nesses of the shell possess an attraction for the 
educated public which has been sated with what 
lies too accessibly on the surface. They hold out 
the flattering promise of an initiation into mys- 
teries not open to all the world. Our wits have 
become pretty well sharpened by the complexities 



152 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

of modern life, and we are ready enough to prove 
our analytical powers on any riddle of poetry or 
economics. And once we have penetrated to the 
heart of these enigmas we are quite at our ease. 
His emotional content is of a sort that requires no 
further adjustment; it demands none of that 
poetical displacement of the person which is so 
uncomfortable to the keen but prosaic intelligence. 
And here that tenth Muse, who has been added 
to the Pantheon for the guidance of the critical 
writer, trembles and starts back. She beholds to 
the right and the left a quaking bog of abstractions 
and metaphysical definitions, whereon if a critic 
so much as set his foot he is sucked down into the 
bottomless mire. She plucks me by the ear and 
bids me keep to the strait and beaten path, 
whispering the self-admonition of one who was 
the darling of her sisters: 

I won't philosophise, and will be read. 

Indeed, the question that arises is no less than 
the ultimate distinction between poetry and prose, 
and " ulti mates " may well have an ugly sound 
to one who is content if he can comprehend what 
is concrete and very near at hand. And, as for 
that, those who would care to hear the matter de- 
bated in iermsoildee ow^Begriff^ Objektivitdt and 
Subjektivitdt, must already be familiar with those 
extraordinary chapters in Schopenhauer wherein 
philosophy and literature are married as they 
have seldom been elsewhere since the days of 



BROWNING 153 

Plato. And yet without any such formidable ap- 
paratus as that, it is not difficult to see that the 
peculiar procedure of Browning's mind offers to 
the reader a pleasure different more in kind than 
in degree from what is commonly associated with 
the word poetry. His very manner of approach- 
ing the passions obliquely, his habit of holding 
his portrayal of character in suspense between 
direct exposition and dramatic reaction, tends to 
keep the attention riveted on the individual 
speaker or problem, and prevents that escape into 
the larger and more general vision which marks 
just the transition from prose to poetry. 

It is not always so. Into that cry " O lyric 
Love ' ' there breaks the note which from the be- 
ginning has made lovers forget themselves in their 
song — the note that passes so easily from the lips 
of Persian Omar to the mouth of British Fitz- 
Gerald: 

Ah Love ! could you and I witli Him conspire 
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, 
Would not we shatter it to bits — and then 
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire ! 

Is it not clear how, in these direct and lyrical 
expressions, the passion of the individual is car- 
ried up into some region where it is blended with 
currents of emotion broader than any one man's 
loss or gain ? and how, reading these words, we, 
too, feel that sudden enlargement of the heart 
which it is the special office of the poet to bestow ? 
But it is equally true that Browning's treatment 



154 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

of love, as in yamcs Lee's Wife and In a Balcony, 
to name the poems nearest at hand, is for the 
most part so involved in his peculiar psychological 
method that we cannot for a moment forget our- 
selves in this freer emotion. 

And in his attitude towards nature it is the 
same thing. I have not read Schopenhauer for 
many years, but I remember as if it were yester- 
day my sensation of joy as in the course of his 
argument I came upon these two lines quoted 
from Horace: 

Nox erat et cselo fulgebat luna sereno 
Inter minora sidera. 

How perfectly simple the words, and yet it was 
as if the splendour of the heavens had broken 
upon me — rather, in some strange way, within 
me. And that, I suppose, is the real function of 
descriptive poetry — not to present a detailed scene 
to the eye, but in its mysterious manner to sink 
our sense of individual life in this larger sympathy 
with the world. Now and then, no doubt, Brown- 
ing, too, strikes this universal note, as, for in- 
stance, in those lines from Paracelsus already 
quoted. But for the most part, his description, 
like his lyrical passion, is adapted with remark- 
able skill towards individualising still further the 
problem or character that he is analysing. Take 
that famous passage in Easter-Day : 

And as I ?aid 
This nonsense, throwing back my head 



BROWNING 155 

With light complacent laugh, I found 

Suddenly all the midnight round 

One fire. The dome of heaven had stood 

As made up of a multitude 

Of handbreadth cloudlets, one vast rack 

Of ripples infinite and black, 

From sky to sky. Sudden there went, 

Like horror and astonishment, 

A fierce vindictive scribble of red 

Quick flame across, as if one said 

(The angry scribe of Judgment), "There — 

Burn it ! " And straight I was aware 

That the whole ribwork round, minute 

Cloud touching cloud beyond compute, 

Was tinted, each with its own spot 

Of burning at the core, till clot 

Jammed against clot, and spilt its fire 

Over all heaven. . . . 

We are far enough from the " Nox erat" of 
Horace or even the ' ' trunks that glare like grates 
of hell " ; we are seeing the world with the eye 
of a man whose mind is perplexed and whose 
imagination is narrowed down by terror to a 
single question : " How hard it is to be A 
Christian!" 

And nothing, perhaps, confirms this impression 
of a body of writing which is neither quite prose 
nor quite poetry more than the rhythm of Brown- 
ing's verse, I^ady Burne-Jones in the Memorials 
of her husband tells of meeting the poet at Den- 
mark Hill, when some talk went on about the 
rate at which the pulse of different people beat. 
Browning suddenly leaned toward her, saying, 



156 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

" Do me the honour to feel my pulse " — but to 
her surprise there was none to feel. His pulse 
was, in fact, never perceptible to touch. The no- 
tion may seem fantastic, but, in view of certain re- 
cent investigations of psychology into the relation 
between our pulse and our sense of rhythm, I have 
wondered whether the lack of any regular systole 
and diastole in Browning's verse may not rest on 
a physical basis. There is undoubtedly a kind of 
proper motion in his language, but it is neither 
the regular rise and fall of verse nor the more 
loosely balanced cadences of prose; or, rather, it 
vacillates from one movement to the other, in a 
way which keeps the rhythmically trained ear in 
a state of acute tension. But it has at least the 
interest of corresponding curiously to the writer's 
trick of steering between the elevation of poetry 
and the analysis of prose. It rounds out com- 
pletely our impression of watching the most ex- 
pert funambulist in English letters. Nor is there 
anything strange in this intimate relation between 
the content of his writing and the mechanism of 
his metre. " The purpose of rhythm," says Mr. 
Yeats in a striking passage of one of his essays, 
** it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the 
moment of contemplation, the moment when we 
are both asleep and awake, which is the one mo- 
ment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring 
monotony, while it holds us waking by variety." 
That is the neo-Celt's mystical way of putting a 
truth that all have felt — the fact that the regular 



BROWNING 157 

sing-song of verse exerts a species of enchantment 
on the senses, lulling to sleep the individual within 
us and translating our thoughts and emotions into 
something significant of the larger experience of 
mankind. 

But I would not leave this aspect of Browning's 
work without making a reservation which may 
seem to some (though wrongly, I think) to in- 
validate all that has been said. For it does hap- 
pen now and again that he somehow produces the 
unmistakable exaltation of poetry through the 
very exaggeration of his unpoetical method. 
Nothing could be more indirect, more oblique, 
than his way of approaching the climax in 
Cleon. The ancient Greek poet, writing " from 
the sprinkled isles, lyily on lily, that o'erlace the 
sea," answers certain queries of Protus the Ty- 
rant. He contrasts the insufficiency of the artistic 
life with that of his master, and laments bitterly 
the vanity of pursuing ideal beauty when the goal 
at the end is only death : 

It is so horrible, 
I dare at times imagine to my need 
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus, 
Unlimited in capability 
For joy, as this is in desire for joy. 

But no ! 

Zeus has not yet revealed it ; and alas, 
He must have done so, were it possible ! 

The poem, one begins to suspect, is a specimen 
of Browning's peculiar manner of indirection; in 



158 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

reality, through this monologue, suspended deli- 
cately between self-examination and dramatic 
confession, he is focussing in one individual heart 
the doom of the great civilisation that is passing 
away and the splendid triumph of the new. And 
then follows the climax, as it were an accidental 
afterthought: 

And for the rest, 
I cannot tell thy messenger aright 
Where to deliver what he bears of thine 
To one called Paulus ; we have heard his fame 
Indeed, if Christus be not one with him — 
I know not, nor am troubled much to know. 
Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew, 
As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised, 
Hath access to a secret shut from us ? 
Thou wrongest our philosophy, O King, 
In stooping to inquire of such an one, 
As if his answer could impose at all ! 
He writeth, doth he ? well, and he may write. 
Oh, the Jew findeth scholars ! certain slaves 
Who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ ; 
And (as I gathered from a bystander) 
Their doctrine could be held by no sane man. 

It is not revoking what has been said to admit 
that the superb audacity of the indirection in 
these underscored lines touches on the sublime; 
the individual is involuntarily rapt into com- 
munion with the great currents that sweep 
through human affairs, and the interest of psy- 
chology is lost in the elevation of poetry. At the 
same time it ought to be added that this effect 



BROWNING 159 

would scarcely have been possible were not the 
rhythm and the mechanism of the verse unusually 
free of Browning's prosaic mannerism. 

It might seem that enough had been said to 
explain why Browning is popular. The attitude 
of the ordinary intelligent reader toward him is, I 
presume, easily stated. A good many of Brown- 
ing's mystifications, So^-dello, for one, he simply 
refuses to bother himself with. Le jeu, he says 
candidly, 7ie vaut pas les chanddles. Other works 
he goes through with some impatience, but with 
an amount of exhilarating surprise sufficient to 
compensate for the annoyances. If he is trained 
in literary distinctions, he will be likely to lay 
down the book with the exclamation: Cest ma- 
g7iifique, mais ce n' est pas la poisie! And probably 
such a distinction will not lessen his admiration; 
for it cannot be asserted too often that the reading 
public to-day is ready to accede to any legitimate 
demand on its analytical understanding, but that 
it responds sluggishly, or only spasmodically, to 
that readjustment of the emotions necessary for 
the sustained enjoyment of such a poem as Para- 
dise Lost. But I suspect that we have not yet 
touched the real heart of the problem. All this 
does not explain that other phase of Browning's 
popularity, which depends upon anything but 
the common sense of the average reader; and, 
least of all, does it account for the library of 
books, of which Professor Herford's is the latest 
example. There is another public which craves 



l6o SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

a different food from the mere display of human 
nature; it is recruited largely by the women's 
clubs and by men who are unwilling or afraid to 
hold their minds in a state of self-centred expect- 
ancy toward the meaning of a civilisation shot 
through by threads of many ages and confused 
colours; it is kept in a state of excitation by 
critics who write lengthily and systematically of 
"joy in soul." Now there is a certain philoso- 
phy which is in a particular way adapted to such 
readers and writers. Its beginnings, no doubt, 
are rooted in the naturalism of Rousseau and 
the eighteenth century, but the flower of it be- 
longs wholly to our own age. It is the philosophy 
whose purest essence may be found distilled in 
Browning's magical alembic, and a single drop 
of it will affect the brain of some people with 
a strange giddiness. 

And here again I am tempted to abscond be- 
hind those blessed words Platonische Ideen and 
Begriffe, universalia ante rem and iiniversalia post 
rem, which offer so convenient an escape from the 
difficulty of meaning what one says. It would 
be so easy with those counters of German meta- 
physicians and the schoolmen to explain how it 
is that Browning has a philosophy of generalised 
notions, and yet so often misses the form of gen- 
eralisation special to the poet. The fact is his 
philosophy is not so much inherent in his writing 
as imposed on it from the outside. His theory 
of love does not expand like Dante's into a great 



BROWNING l6l 

vision of life wherein symbol and reality are fused 
together, but is added as a commentary on the 
action or situation. And on the other hand he 
does not accept the simple and pathetic incom- 
pleteness of life as a humbler poet might, but 
must try with his reason to reconcile it with an 
ideal system: 

Over the ball of it, 

Peering aud prying. 
How I see all of it, 

Life there, outlying ! 
Roughness and smoothness, 

Shine and defilement, 
Grace and uncouthness : 

One reconcilement. 

Yet "ideal" and "reconcilement" are scarcely 
the words; for Browning's philosophy, when de- 
tached, as it may be, from its context, teaches 
just the acceptance of life in itself as needing no 
conversion into something beyond its own im- 
pulsive desires: 

Let us not always say, 
" Spite of this flesh to-day 

I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole !" 
As the bird wings and sings, 
Let us cry, " All good things 

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh 
helps soul !" 

Passion to Shakespeare was the source of trag- 
edy; there is no tragedy, properly speaking, in 
Browning, for the reason that passion is to him 



VOL. III.— II. 



t62 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

essentially good. By sheer bravado of human 
emotion we justify our existence, nay — 

We have to live alone to set forth well 
God's praise. 

His notion of ' 'moral strength, ' ' as Professor San- 
tayana so forcibly says, " is a blind and miscel- 
laneous vehemence." 

But if all the passions have their own validity, 
one of them in particular is the power that moves 
through all and renders them all good: 

In my own heart love had not been made wise 
To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, 
To know even hate is but a mask of love's. 

It is the power that reaches up from earth to 
heaven, and the divine nature is no more than a 
higher, more vehement manifestation of its energy : 

For the loving worm within its clod 
Were diviner than a loveless god. 

And in the closing vision of Said this thought of 
the identity of man's love and God's love is uttered 
by David in a kind of delirious ecstasy: 

'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, 

that I seek 
In the Godhead ! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall 

be 
A Face like my face that receives thee ; a Man like to 

me, 
Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever : a Hand like 

this hand 
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! See the 

Christ stand ! 



BROWNING 163 

But there is no need to multiply quotations. 
The point is that in all Browning's rhapsody- 
there is nowhere a hint of any break between the 
lower and the higher nature of man, or between 
the human and the celestial character. Not that 
his philosophy is pantheistic, for it is Hebraic in 
its vivid sense of God's distinct personality; but 
that man's love is itself divine, only lesser in de- 
gree. There is nothing that corresponds to the 
tremendous words of Beatrice to Dante when he 
meets her face to face in the Terrestrial Paradise: 

Guardami ben : ben son, ben son Beatrice. 
Come deguasti d' accedere al monte? 
Non sapei tu che qui e ruom felice? 

(Behold me well : lo, Beatrice am I. 

And thou, how daredst thou to this mount draw nigh? 

Knew'st thou not here was man's felicity ?) — 

nothing that corresponds to the "scot of peni- 
tence," the tears, and the plunge into the river of 
Lethe before the new, transcendent love begins. 
Indeed, the point of the matter is not that Brown- 
ing magnifies human love in its own sphere of 
beauty, but that he speaks of it with the voice of 
a prophet of spiritual things and proclaims it as a 
complete doctrine of salvation. Often, as I read 
the books on Browning's gospel of human pas- 
sion, my mind recurs to that scene in the Gospel 
of St. John, wherein it is told how a certain Nico- 
demus of the Pharisees came to Jesus by night and 
was puzzled by the hard saying: " Except a man 



164 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of 
God." There is no lack of confessions from that 
day to this of men to whom it has seemed that 
they were born again, and always, I believe, the 
new birth, like the birth of the body, was con- 
summated with wailing and anguish, and after- 
wards the great peace. This is a mystery into 
which it is no business of mine to enter, but with 
the singularly uniform record of these confessions 
in my memory, I cannot but wonder at the light 
message of the new prophet : " If you desire faith 
— then you 've faith enough," and " For God is 
glorified in man." I am even sceptical enough 
to believe that the vaunted conclusion of Fifijie at 
the Fair, " I end with — lyove is all and Death is 
naught," sounds like the wisdom of a schoolgirl. 
There is an element in Browning's popularity 
which springs from those readers who are content 
to look upon the world as it is; they feel the 
power of his lyric song when at rare intervals it 
flows in pure and untroubled grace, and they en- 
joy the intellectual legerdemain of his suspended 
psychology. But there is another element in that 
popularity (and this, unhappily, is the inspiration 
of the clubs and of the formulating critics) which 
is concerned too much with this flattering substi- 
tute for spiritualit)^ Undoubtedly, a good deal 
of restiveness exists under what is called the 
materialism of modern life, and many are looking 
in this way and that for an escape into the purer 
joy which they hear has passed from the world. 



BROWNING 165 

It used to be believed that Calderon was a bearer 
of the message, Calderon who expressed the doc- 
trine of the saints and the poets: 

Pues el delito mayor 

Del hombre es haber nacido — 

(since the greatest transgression of man is to 
have been born). It was believed that the spirit- 
ual life was bought with a price, and that the 
desires of this world must first suffer a permuta- 
tion into something not themselves. I am not 
holding a brief for that austere doctrine; I am not 
even sure that I quite understand it, although it 
is written at large in many books. But I do 
know that those who think they have found its 
equivalent in the poetry of Browning are misled 
by wandering and futile lights. The secret of his 
more esoteric fame is just this, that he dresses a 
worldly and easy philosophy in the forms of spirit- 
ual faith and so deceives the troubled seekers after 
the higher life. 

It is not pleasant to be convicted of throwing 
stones at the prophets, as I shall appear to many 
to have done. My only consolation is that, if the 
prophet is a true teacher, these stones of the casual 
passer-by merely raise a more conspicuous monu- 
ment to his honour; but if he turns out in the end 
to be a false prophet (as I believe Browning to 
have been) — why, then, let his disciples look to it. 



A NOTE ON BYRON'S "DON JUAN" 

It has often been a source of wonder to me that 
I was able to read and enjoy Byron's Do7i Jua^i 
under the peculiar circumstances attending my 
introduction to that poem. I had been walking 
in the Alps, and after a day of unusual exertion 
found myself in the village of Chamouni, fatigued 
and craving rest. A copy of the Tauchnitz edi- 
tion fell into my hands, and there, in a little room, 
through a summer's day, by a window which 
looked full upon the unshadowed splendour of 
Mont Blanc, I sat and read, and only arose when 
Juan faded out of sight with ' ' the phantom of her 
frolic Grace— Fitz-Fulke." I have often won- 
dered, I say, why the incongruity of that solemn 
Alpine scene Vv^ith the mockery of Byron's wit did 
not cause me to shut the book and thrust it away, 
for in general I am highly sensitive to the nature 
of my surroundings w^hile reading. Only recently, 
on taking up the poem again for the purpose of 
editing it, did the answer to that riddle occur to 
me, and with it a better understanding of the 
place of Don Jtian among the great epics which 
might have seemed in finer accord with the sub- 
limity and peace of that memorable day. 

In one respect, at least, it needed no return to 

i66 



BYRON'S "DON JUAN" 167 

Byron's work to show how closely it is related in 
spirit to the accepted canons of the past. These 
poets, who have filled the world with their 
rumour, all looked upon life with some curious 
obliquity of vision. We, who have approached 
the consummation of the world's hope, know that 
happiness and peace and the fulfilment of desires 
are about to settle down and brood for ever more 
over the lot of mankind, but with them it seems 
to have been otherwise. Who can forget the re- 
curring minynthadion of Homer, in which he 
summed up for the men of his day the vanity of 
long aspirations? So if we were asked to point 
out the lines of Shakespeare that express most 
completely his attitude toward life, we should 
probably quote that soliloquy of Hamlet wherein 
he catalogues the evils of existence, and only in 
the fear of future dreams finds a reason for con- 
tinuance; or we should cite that sonnet of dis- 
illusion: " Tired with all these for restful death I 
cry." And as for the lyric poets, sooner or later 
the lament of Shelley was wrung from the lips of 
each: 

Out of the day aud night 
A joy has taken flight : 

Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar 
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight 

No more— oh, never more! 

This, I repeat, is a strange fact, for it appears 
that these poets, prophets who spoke in the 



l68 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

language of beauty and who have held the world's 
reverence so long — it appears now that these in- 
terpreters of the fates were all misled. Possibly, 
as Aristotle intimated, genius is allied to some 
vice of the secretions which produces a melan- 
cholia of the brain; something like this, indeed, 
only expressed in more recondite terms, may be 
found in the most modern theory of science. But 
more probabl}' they wrote merely from insufficient 
experience, not having perceived how the human 
race with increase of knowledge grows in happi- 
ness. Thus, at least, it seems to one who ob- 
serves the tides of thought. Next year, or the 
next, some divine invention shall come which will 
prove this melancholy of the poets to have been 
only a childish ignorance of man's sublimer des- 
tiny; some discovery of a new element more 
wonderful than radium will render the ancient 
brooding over human feebleness a matter of 
laughter and astonishment; some acceptance of 
the larger brotherhood of the race will wipe away 
all tears and bring down upon earth the fair 
dream of heaven, a reality and a possession for 
ever; some new philosophy of the soul will con- 
vert the old poems of conflict into meaningless 
fables, stale and unprofitable. Already we see 
the change at hand. To how many persons to- 
day does Browning appeal — though they would 
not always confess it — more powerfully than 
Homer or Milton or any other of the great names 
of antiquity ? And the reason of this closer appeal 



BYRON'S " DON JUAN " 169 

of Browning is chiefly the unflagging optimism of 
his philosophy, his full-blooded knowledge and 
sympathy which make the wailings of the past 
somewhat silly in our ears, if truth must be told. 
I never read Browning but those extraordi- 
nary lines of Euripides recur to my mind : ' ' Not 
now for the first time do I regard mortal things 
as a shadow, nor would I fear to charge with 
supreme folly those artificers of words who are 
reckoned the sages of mankind, for no man among 
mortals is happy." Qvt^rc^v yap ovdsh sariv 
svdai/JGOv, indeed ! — would any one be shameless 
enough to utter such words under the new dis- 
pensation of official optimism ? 

It is necessary to think of these things before 
we attempt to criticise Byron, for Do?i yuatt, too, 
despite its marvellous vivacity, looks upon life 
from the old point of view. Already, for this 
reason in part, it seems a little antiquated to us, 
and in a few j^ears it may be read only as a curi- 
osity. Meanwhile for the few who lag behind in 
the urgent march of progress the poem will pos- 
sess a special interest just because it presents the 
ancient thesis of the poets and prophets in a novel 
form. Of course, in many lesser matters it makes 
a wider and more lasting appeal. Part of the 
Haidee episode, for instance, is so exquisitely 
lovely, so radiant with the golden haze of youth, 
that even in the wiser happiness of our maturity 
we may still turn to it with a kind of complacent 
delight. Briefer passages scattered here and 



I/O SHELBURNE ESSAYS 



there, such as the " 'T is sweet to hear," and the 
"Ave Maria," need ouly a little abridgment at 
the close to fit them perfectly for any future 
anthology devoted to the satisfaction and the 
ultimate significance of human emotions. But, 
strangely enough, these disturbing climaxes, 
which will demand to be forgotten, or to be re- 
arranged as we restore old mutilated statues, do, 
indeed, point to those very qualities which render 
the poem so extraordinary a complement to the 
great and accepted epics of the past. For the 
present it may yet be sufficient to consider Don 
Juan as it is — with all its enormities upon it. 

And, first of all, we shall make a sad mistake 
if we regard the poem as a mere work of satire. 
Occasionally Byron pretends to lash himself into 
a righteous fury over the vices of the age, but w^e 
know that this is all put on, and that the real 
savageness of his nature comes out only when he 
thinks of his own personal wrongs. Now this is 
a very difierent thing from the deliberate and 
sustained denunciation of a vicious age such as 
we find in Juvenal, a difi'erent thing utterly from 
the s(zva indignatio that devoured the heart and 
brain of poor Swift. There is in Don Juan some- 
thing of the personal satire of Pope, and some- 
thing of the whimsical mockery of lyucilius and 
his imitators. But it needs but a little discern- 
ment to see that Byron's poem has vastly greater 
scope and significance than the Epistle to Dr. 
Arbuthnot, or the spasmodic gaiety of the Menip- 



BYRON'S " DON JUAN " 17I 

pean satire. It does in its own way present a 
view of life as a whole, with the good and the evil, 
and so passes beyond the category of the merely 
satirical. The very scope of its subject, if no- 
thing more, classes it with the more universal 
epics of literature rather than with the poems that 
portray only a single aspect of life. 

Byron himself was conscious of this, and more 
than once alludes to the larger aspect of his work. 
" If you must have an epic," he once said to 
Medwin, " there 's Don Juan for you; it is an 
epic as much in the spirit of our day as the Iliad 
was in that of Homer." And in one of the asides 
in the poem itself he avows the same design : 

A panoramic view of Hell's in training, 
After the style of Virgil and of Homer, 
So that my name of Epic 's no misnomer. 

Hardly the style of those stately writers, to be 
sure, but an epic after its own fashion the poem 
certainly is. That Byron's way is not the way of 
the older poets requires uo emphasis; they 

reveled in the fancies of the time. 
True Knights, chaste Dames, huge Giants, Kings 
despotic ; 
But all these, save the last, being obsolete, 
I chose a modern subject as more meet- 
Being cut off from the heroic subjects of the 
established school, he still sought to obtain some- 
thing of the same large and liberating effect 
through the use of a frankly modern theme. 



1/2 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

The task was not less difficult than his success 
was singular and marked; and that is why it 
seemed in no way inappropriate, despite its occa- 
sional lapse of licentiousness, to read Don yuan 
with the white reflection of Mont Blanc streaming 
through the window. Homer might have been 
so read, or Virgil, or any of those poets who pre- 
sented life solemnly and magniloquently; I do not 
think I could have held my mind to Juvenal or 
Pope or even Horace beneath the calm radiance 
of that Alpine light, 

I have said that the great poets all took a 
sombre view of the world. Man is but the dream 
of a shadozv, said Pindar, speaking for the race of 
genius, and Byron is conscious of the same in- 
sight into the illusive spectacle. He has looked 
with like vision upon 

this scene of all-confessed Inanity, 
By Saint, by Sage, by Preacher, and by Poet, 

and will not in his turn refrain ' ' from holding 
up the nothingness of life." So in the introduc- 
tion to the seventh canto he runs through the list 
of those who have preached and sung this solemn, 
but happily to us outworn, theme: 

I say no more than hath been said in Dante's 
Verse, and by Solomon and by Cervantes, 

It must not be supposed, however, because the 
heroic poems of old were touched with the petti- 
ness and sadness of human destiny, that their 
influence on the reader was supposed to be narrow- 



BYRON S "DON JUAN 173 

ing or depressing; the name "heroic" implies 
the contrary of that. Indeed their very inspira- 
tion was derived from the fortitude of a spirit 
struggHng to rise above the league of little things 
and foiling despairs. It may seem paradoxical to 
us, yet it is true that these morbid poets believed 
in the association of men with gods and in the 
grandeur of mortal passions. So Achilles and 
Hector, both with the knowledge of their brief 
destiny upon them, both filled with foreboding of 
frustrate hopes, strive nobly to the end of mag- 
nanimous defeat. There lay the greatness of the 
heroic epos for readers of old, — the sense of human 
littleness, the melancholy of broken aspirations, 
swallowed up in the transcending sublimity of 
man's endurance and daring. And men of lesser 
mould, who knew so well the limitations of their 
sphere, took courage and were taught to look 
down unmoved upon their harassed fate. 

Now Byron came at a time of transition from 
the old to the new. The triumphs of material 
discovery, "Z.^ magnifiche sorti e progressive^^'' 
had not yet cast a reproach on the earlier sense 
of life's futility, while at the same time the faith 
in heroic passions had passed away. An attempt 
to create an epic in the old spirit would have 
been doomed, was indeed doomed in the hands of 
those who undertook it. The very language in 
which Byron presents the ancient universal belief 
of Plato and those others 

Who knew this life was not worth a potato, — 



174 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

shows how far he was from the loftier mode of 
imagination. In place of heroic passion he must 
seek another outlet of relief, another mode of 
purging away melancholy; and the spirit of the 
burlesque came lightly to his use as the only 
available vis mcdica. The feeling was common 
to his age, but he alone was able to adapt the 
motive to epic needs. How often the melancholy 
sentimentality of Heine corrects itself by a bur- 
lesque conclusion! Or, if we regard the novel, 
how often does Thackeray in like manner replace 
the old heroic rehef of passion by a kindly smile 
at the brief and busy cares of men. But neither 
Heine nor Thackeray carries the principle of the 
burlesque to its artistic completion, or makes it 
the avowed motive of a complicated action, as 
Byron does in Don Juan. That poem is indeed 
"prolific of melancholy merriment." It is not 
necessary to point out at length the persistence of 
this mock-heroic spirit. Love, ambition, home- 
attachments, are all burlesqued; battle ardour, 
the special theme of epic sublimity, is subjected 
to the same quizzical mockery : 

There was not now a luggage boy, but sought 

Danger and spoil with ardour much increased ; 
And why ? because a little— odd — old man, 
Stripped to his shirt, was come to lead the van. 

In the gruesome shipwreck scene the tale of suffer- 
ing which leads to cannibahsm is interrupted thus: 

At length they caught two Boobies, and a Noddy, 
And then they left off eating the dead body. 



BYRON'S "DON JUAN " I75 

The description of London town as seen from 
Shooter's Hill ends with this absurd metaphor: 

A huge, dun Cupola, like a foolscap crown 
On a fool's head — and there is London Town ! 

Even Death laughs, — death that ^'hiatus maxime 
deflendus,'' " the duunest of all duns," etc. And, 
last of all, the poet turns the same weapon against 
his own art. Do the lines for a little while grow 
serious, he suddenly pulls himself up with a 
sneer: 

Here I must leave him, for I grow pathetic, 
Moved by the Chinese nymph of tears, green tea ! 

I trust, however, it has been made sufficiently- 
clear that Don J nan is something quite different 
from the mere mock-heroic — from Pulci, for in- 
stance, "sire of the half-serious rhyme," whom 
Byron professed to imitate. The poem is in a 
sense not half but wholly serious, for the very 
reason that it takes so broad a view of human 
activity, and because of its persistent moral sense. 
(Which is nowise contradicted by the immoral 
scenes in several of the cantos.) It is not, for 
example, possible to think of finding in Pulci 
such a couplet as this : 

But almost sanctify the sweet excess 

By the immortal wish and power to bless. 

He who could write such lines as those was not 



176 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

merely indulging his humour. Do7i Juan is 
something more than 

A versified Aurora Borealis, 
Which flashes o'er a waste and icy clime. 

Out of the bitterness of his soul, out of the wreck 
of his passions which, though heroic in intensity, 
had ended in quailing of the heart, he sought 
what the great makers of epic had sought, — a 
solace and a sense of uplifted freedom. The 
heroic ideal was gone, the refuge of religion was 
gone ; but, passing to the opposite extreme, by 
showing the power of the human heart to mock at 
all things, he would still set forth the possibility 
of standing above and apart from all things. 
He, too, went beyond the limitations of destiny 
by laughter, as Homer and Virgil and Milton 
had risen by the imagination. And, in doing 
this, he wrote the modern epic. 

We are learning a new significance of human 
life, as I said; and the sublime audacities of the 
elder poets in attempting to transcend the melan- 
cholia of their day are growing antiquated, just as 
Byron's heroic mockery is turning stale. In a 
few years we shall have come so much closer to 
the mysteries over which the poets bungled help- 
lessly, that we can afford to forget their rhap- 
sodies. Meanwhile it may not be amiss to make 
clear to ourselves the purpose and character of one 
of the few, the very few, great poems in our 
literature. 



LAURENCE STERNE 

A NUMBKR of excellent editions of our standard 
authors have been put forth during the last two 
or three years, but none of them, perhaps, has 
been of such real service to letters as the new 
Sterne edited by Professor Wilbur ly. Cross.' 

Ordinarily the fresh material advertised in 
these editions is in large measure rubbish which 
had been deliberately discarded by the author and 
whose resuscitation is an impertinence to his 
memory. Certainly this is true of Murray's new 
Byron; it is in part true of the great editions of 
Hazlitt and I^amb recently published, to go no 
further afield. But with Sterne the case is differ- 
ent. The Jouryial to Eliza and the letters now 
first printed in full from the "Gibbs manuscript " 
are a genuine aid in getting at the heart of Sterne's 
elusive character. Even more important is the 
readjustment of dates for the older correspond- 
ence, which the present editor has accomplished 
at the cost of considerable pains, for the setting 
back of a letter two years may make all the differ- 

' The Complete Works of Laurence Sterne. Edited by 
Wilbiir ly. Cross, Supplemented with the Life by Percy 
Fitzgerald. 12 volumes. New York : J. F. Taylor & Co. 
1904. 

.177 



178 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

ence between a lying knave and an unstable 
sentimentalist. In the spring of 1767, just a 
year before his death, Sterne was inditing those 
rather sickly letters and the newly published 
Journal to Eliza, a susceptible young woman who 
was about to sail for India. " The coward," says 
Thackeray, "was writing gay letters to his friends 
this while, with sneering allusions to his poor 
foolish Brahmhie. Her ship was not out of 
the Downs, and the charming Sterne was at 
the ' Mount Coflfee-House,' with a sheet of gilt- 
edged paper before him, offering that precious 

treasure, his heart, to Lady P ." It is an 

ugly charge, and indeed Thackeray's whole por- 
trait of the humourist is harshly painted. But 
Sterne was not sneering in other letters at his 
' ' Brahmine, " as he called the rather spoiled East 
India lady, and it turns out from some very pretty 
calculations of Professor Cross that the particular 
note to Lady P[ercy] must have been written at 
the Mount CoflFee-House two years before he ever 
knew Eliza. "Coward," "wicked," "false," 
"wretched worn-out old scamp," "mountebank," 
" foul Satyr," " the last words the famous author 
wrote were bad and wicked, the last lines the poor 
stricken wretch penned were for pity and pardon" 
— for shame, Mr. Thackeray! Sterne was a weak 
man, one may admit; wretched and worn-out he 
was when the final blow struck him in his lonely 
hired room; but is there no pity and pardon on 
your pen for the wayward penitent? You had 



LAURENCE STERNE 1 79 

sympathy enough and facile tears enough for the 
genial Costigans and the others who followed 
their hearts too readily; have you wo Alas, poor 
Yorick ! for the author who gave you these char- 
acters ? You could smile at Pendennis when he 
used the old songs for a second love; was it a 
terrible thing that Yorick should have taken pas- 
sages from his early letters (copies of which were 
thriftily preserved after the fashion of the day) 
and sent them as the bubblings of fresh emotion 
at the end of his life? " One solitary plate, one 
knife, one fork, one glass ! — I gave a thousand 
pensive, penetrating looks at the chair thou hadst 
so often graced, in those quiet and sentimental 
repasts — then laid down my knife and fork, and 
took out my handkerchief, and clapped it across 
my face, and wept like a child" — he wrote to 
Miss L,umley who afterwards became Mrs. Sterne ; 
and in the yournal kept for Eliza when he was 
broken in spirit and near to death, you may read 
the same words, as Thackeray read them in 
manuscript, and you may call them false and 
lying; but I am inclined to believe they were 
quite as genuine as most of the pathos of that 
lachrymose age. The want of sympathy in 
Thackeray's case is the harder to understand for 
the reason that to Sterne more than to any other 
of the eighteenth-century wits he would seem to 
owe his style and his turn of thought. On many 
a page his peculiar sentiment reads like a direct 
imitation of Tristram Shandy ; add but a touch 



l8o SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

of caprice to Colonel Newcome and you might 
almost imagine my Uncle Toby parading in the 
nineteenth century; and I think it is just the lack 
of this whimsical touch that makes the good 
colonel a little mawkish to many readers. And 
if one is to look for an antetype of Thackeray's 
exquisite English, whither shall one turn unless 
to the Sermons of Mr. Yorick ? There is a taint 
of ingratitude in his affectation of being shocked at 
the irregularities of one to whom he was so much 
indebted, and I fear Mr. Thackeray was too con- 
sciously appealing to the Philistine prejudices of 
the good folk who were listening to his lectures. 
Afterwards, when the mischief was done, he suf- 
fered what looks like a qualm of conscience. In 
one of the Roundabout Papers he tells how he 
slept in Sterne's old hotel at Calais: " When I 
went to bed in the room, in his room, when I 
think how I admire, dislike, and have abused 
him, a certain dim feeling of apprehension filled 
my mind at the midnight hour. What if I should 
see his lean figure in the black-satin breeches, his 
sinister smile, his long thin finger pointing to me 
in the moonlight!" Unfortunately the popular 
notion of Sterne is still based almost exclusively 
on the picture of him in the Eriglish Humourists, 
It is to be hoped that at last this carefully pre- 
pared edition will do something toward dispelling 
that false impression. Certainly, the various in- 
troductions furnished by Professor Cross are ad- 
mirable for their fairness and insight. He does 



LAURENCE STERNE l8l 

not attempt a panegyric of Sterne, as did Mr. 
Fitzgerald in the first edition of the Life, nor does 
he awkwardly overlay panegyric with censure, as 
these are found in the present revised form of that 
narrative; he recognises the errors of the senti- 
mentalist, but he does not call them by exagger- 
ated names. And he sees, too, the fundamental 
sincerity of the man, knowing that no great book 
was ever penned without that quality, whatever 
else might be missing. I think he will account it 
for service in a good cause if, as an essayist taking 
my material where it may be found, I try to draw 
a little closer still to the sly follower of Rabelais 
whom he has honoured by so elaborate a study. 

Possibly Professor Cross does not recognise 
fully enough the influence of Sterne's early years 
on his character. It is indeed a vagrant and 
Shandean childhood to which the Rev. Mr. 
Laurence Sterne introduces us in the Memoir 
written late in life for the benefit of his daughter 
Lydia. The father, a lieutenant in Haudaside's 
regiment, passed from engagement to idleness, 
and from barrack to barrack, more than was the 
custom even in those unsettled days. At Clon- 
mel, in the south of Ireland, November 24, 17 13, 
Laurence was born, a few days after the arrival of 
his mother from Dunkirk. Other children had 
been given to the luckless couple, and were yet to 
be added, but here and there they were dropped 
on the wayside in pathetic graves, leaving in the 
end only two, the future novelist and his sister 



1 82 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

Catherine, who married a publican in London 
and became estranged from her brother by her 
"uncle's wickedness and her own folly" — sa3^s 
Laurence. Of the mother it is not necessary to 
say much. The difficulties of her life as a hanger- 
on in camps seem to have hardened her, and her 
temper ("clamorous and rapacious," he called it) 
was in all points unlike her son's. That Sterne 
neglected her brutally is a charge as old as Wal- 
pole's scandalous tongue, and Byron, taking his 
cue from thence, gave piquancy to the accusation 
by saying that " he preferred whining over a dead 
ass to relieving a living mother. ' ' Sterne' s minute 
refutation of the slander may now be read at full 
length in a letter to the very uncle who set the 
tale agoing. The boy would seem to have taken 
the father's mercurial temperament, though not 
his physique: 

The regiment [he writes] was sent to defend Gibraltar, 
at the siege, where my father was run through the body 
by Capt. Phillips, in a duel (the quarrel began about a 
goose!): with much difiBculty he survived, though with 
an impaired constitution, which was not able to with- 
stand the hardships it was put to ; for he was sent to 
Jamaica, where he soon fell by the country fever, which 
took away his senses first, and made a child of him ; and 
then, in a mouth or two, walking about continually 
without complaining, till the moment he sat down in an 
armchair, and breathed his last, which was at Port An- 
tonio, on the north of the island. My father was a little 
smart man, active to the last degree in all exercises, 
most patient of fatigue and disappointments, of which it 
pleased God to give him full measure. He was, in his 



LAURENCE STERNE 183 

temper, somewhat rapid and hasty, but of a kindly, 
sweet disposition, void of all design ; and so innocent in 
his own intentions, that he suspected no one ; so that 
you might have cheated him ten times in a day, if nine 
had not been sufficient for your purpose. 

Lieutenant Sterne died in 1731, and it would 
require but a few changes in the son's record to 
make it read like a page from Henry Esmond ; 
the very texture of the language, the turn of the 
quizzical pathos, are Thackeray's. 

Laurence at this time was at school near Hali- 
fax, where he got into a characteristic scrape. 
The ceiling of the schoolroom had been newly 
whitewashed; the ladder was standing, and the 
boy mounted it and wrote in large letters, La.u. 
Sterne. The usher whipped him severely, but, 
says the Memoir, ' ' my master was very much 
hurt at this, and said, before me, that never 
should that name be effaced, for I was a boy of 
genius, and he was sure I should come to prefer- 
ment." From Halifax Sterne went to Jesus Col- 
lege, Cambridge, at the expense of a cousin. An 
uncle at York next took charge of him and got 
him the living of Sutton, and afterwards the 
Prebendary of York. Just how he came to 
quarrel with this patron we shall probably never 
know. Sterne himself declares that his uncle 
wished him to write political paragraphs for the 
Whigs, that he detested such "dirty work," and 
got his uncle's hatred in return for his independ- 
ence. According to the writer of the Yorkshire 



l84 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

Anecdotes, the two fell out over a woman — which 
sounds more like the truth. Meanwhile, I^au- 
rence had been successfully courting Miss Eliza- 
beth lyumley at York, and, during her absence, 
had been writing those love-letters which his 
daughter published after the death of her par- 
ents, to the immense increase of sentimentalism 
throughout the United Kingdom. They are, in 
sooth, but a sickly, hothouse production, though 
honestly enough meant, no doubt. The writer, 
too, kept a copy of them, and thriftily made use 
of select passages at a later date, as we have seen. 
Miss lyumley became Mrs. Sterne in due time, 
and brought to her husband a modest jointure, 
and another living at Stillington, so that he was 
now a pluralist, although far from rich. The 
marriage was not particularly happy. Madam, 
one gathers, was pragmatic and contentious and 
unreasonable, her reverend spouse was volatile 
and pleasure-loving; and when, in the years of 
Yorick's fame, they went over to France, she de- 
cided to stay there with her daughter. Sterne 
seems to have been fond of her always, in a way, 
and in money matters was never anything but 
generous and tactfully considerate. A bad- 
hearted man is not so thoughtful of his wife's 
comfort after she has left him, as Sterne's letters 
show him to have been; and even Thackeray ad- 
raits that his affection for the girl was " artless, 
kind, affectionate, and 7Zi7/ sentimental." 

But the lawful Mrs. Sterne was not the only 



LAURENCE STERNE 185 

woman at whose feet the parson of Sutton and 
StiUington was sighing. There was that Mile. 
de Fourmantelle, a Huguenot refugee, the ' ' dear, 
dear Kitty ' ' (or ' 'Jenny ' ' as she becomes in Tris- 
tram Shandy)^ to whom he sends presents of wine 
and honey (with notes asking, ' ' What is honey 
to the sweetness of thee?"), and who followed 
him to London in the heyday of his fame, where 
somehow she fades mysteriously out of view. "I 
myself must ever have some Dulcinea in my 
head," he said; " it harmonises the soul." And, 
in truth, the soul of Yorick was mewed in the 
cage of his breast very near his heart, and never 
stretched her wings out of that close atmosphere. 
Charity was his creed in the pulpit, and his love 
of woman had a curious and childlike way of 
fortifying the Christian love of his neighbour. 
Most famous of all was his passion — it seems al- 
most to have been a passion in this case — for the 
famous " Eliza." Towards the end of his life he 
had become warmly attached to a certain William 
James, a retired Indian commodore, and his wife, 
who were the best and most wholesome of his 
friends. At their London home he met Mrs. 
Elizabeth Draper, and soon became romantically 
attached to her. When the time drew near for 
her to sail to India to rejoin her husband, he 
wrote a successi^)n of notes in a kind of paroxysm 
of grief for himself and anxiety for her, and for 
several months afterwards he kept a journal of his 
emotions for her benefit some day. He was dead 



l86 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

in less than a year. The letters she kept, and in 
due time printed, because it was rumoured that 
Lydia was to publish them from copies — a pretty 
bit of wrangling among all these women there 
was, over the sentimental relics of poor Yorick ! 
The Jouryial is now for the first time included in 
the author's works — a singular document, as ec- 
centric in spelling and grammar as the sentiment 
is hard to define, a wild and hysterical record. 
But it rings true on the whole, and confirms the 
belief that Sterne's feelings were genuine, how- 
ever short-lived they may have been. The last 
letter to Bliza is pitiful with its tale of a broken 
body and a sick heart: " In ten minutes after I 
dispatched my letter, this poor, fine-spun frame 
of Yorick's gave way, and I broke a vessel in my 
breast, and could not stop the loss of blood till 
four this morning. I have filled all thy India 
handkerchiefs with it. — It came, I think, from 
my heart! I fell asleep through weakness. At 
six I awoke, with the bosom of my shirt steeped 
in tears." All through the yournal'Ca2X follows 
are indications of wasted health and of the per- 
plexities of life that were closing in upon him. 
Only at rare intervals the worries are forgotten, 
and we get a picture of serener moments. One 
day, July 2nd, he grows genuinely idyllic, and it 
may not be amiss to copy out his note just as he 
penned it: 

But I am in the Vale of Coxwould & wish You saw in 
how princely a manner I live in it — tis a I^and of Plenty 



LAURENCE STERNE 1 8/ 

— I sit down alone to Venison, fish or wild fowl — or a 
couple of fowls — with curds, and strawberrys & cream, 
(and all the simple clean plenty w'^^ a rich Vally can 
produce, — with a Bottle of wine on my right hand (as in 
Bond street) to drink y! health — I have a hundred hens 
& chickens [he sometimes spelt it chickings\ ab'. my 
yard — and not a parishoner catches a hare a rabbit or a 
Trout — but he brings it as an oflFering — In short tis a 
golden Vally — & will be the golden Age when You 
govern the rural feast, my Bramine, & are the Mistress 
of my table & spread it with elegancy and that natural 
grace & bounty w'*? w"^*? heaven has distinguish'd You . . . 
— Time goes on slowly — every thing stands still — 
hours seem days & days seem Years whilst you lengthen 
the Distance between us — from Madras to Bombay — I 
shall think it shortening — and then desire & expectation 
will be upon the rack again — come — come — 

But Eliza never came until Yorick had gone on 
a longer journey than Bombay. In England once 
more, she traded on her relation to the famous 
writer, and then reviled him. She associated 
with John Wilkes, and afterwards with the Abbe 
Raynal, who writ an absurd, pompous eulogy on 
"the Lady who has been so celebrated as the 
Correspondent of Mr. Sterne." It is engraved on 
her tomb in Bristol Cathedral that "genius and be- 
nevolence were united in her ' ' ; but the long letter 
composed in the vein of Mrs. Montagu and now 
printed from her manuscript belies the first, and 
her behaviour after Sterne's death makes a 
mockery of the second. 

All this new material throws light on a phase 
of this matter which cannot be avoided in any 



l88 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

discussion of Sterne's character: How far did his 
immorality actually extend? To Thackeray he 
was a ' ' foul Satyr ' ' ; Bagehot thought he was 
merely an "old flirt," and others have seen vari- 
ous degrees of guilt in his philanderings. Now 
his relation to Eliza would seem to be pretty de- 
cisive of his character in this respect, and fortu- 
nately the evidence here published in full by 
Professor Cross leaves little room for doubt. 
There is, for one thing, an extraordinary letter 
which is given in facsimile from the rough draft, 
with all its erasures and corrections. It was 
addressed to Daniel Draper, but was never sent, 
apparently never completed. The substance of it 
is, to say the least, unusual : 

I own it, Sir, that the writing a letter to a gentleman I 
have not the honour to be known to — a letter likewise 
upon no kind of business (in the ideas of the world) is a 
little out of the common course of things — but I'm so 
myself, and the impulse which makes me take up my 
pen is out of the common way too, for it arises from the 
honest pain I should feel in having so great esteem and 
friendship as I bear for Mrs. Draper — if I did not wish to 
hope and extend it to Mr. Draper also. I am really, 
dear sir, in love with your wife ; but 'tis a love you 
would honour me for, for 'tis so like that I bear my own 
daughter, who is a good creature, that I scarce dis- 
tinguish a difference betwixt it — that moment I had 
would have been the last. 

Follows a polite offer of services, which is nothing 
to our purpose. 

Now it is easy to say that such a letter was 



LAURENCE STERNE 189 

written with the hypocritical intention of allaying 
Mr. Draper's possible suspicions, and certainly 
the last sentence overshoots the mark. Against 
the general innocence of Sterne's life there exist, 
in particular, two damaging bits of evidence — that 
infamous thing in dog-L,atin addressed to the 
master of the "Demoniacs," whose meaning must 
have been quite lost upon the daughter who pub- 
lished it, and a pair of brief notes to a woman 
named Hannah. Of the Latin letter one may say 
that it was probably written in the exaggerated 
tone of bravado suitable to its recipient; of both 
this and the notes one may add that they do not 
incriminate the later years of Sterne's life. As 
an offset we now have that extraordinary memo- 
randum in the Journal to Eliza, dated April 24, 
1767, which states explicitly, and convincingly, 
that he had led an entirely chaste life for the past 
fifteen years. It is not requisite, or indeed possi- 
ble, to enter into the evidence further in this place, 
but the general inference may be stated with 
something like assurance: Sterne's relation to 
Eliza was purely sentimental, as was the case 
with most of his philandering; at the same time 
in his earlier years he had probably indulged in a 
life of pleasure such as was by no means uncom- 
mon among the clergy of his day. He was neither 
quite the lying scoundrel of Thackeray nor the 
"old flirt " of Bagehot, but a man led into many 
follies, and many kindnesses also, by an impulsive 
heart and a worldly philosophy. It is not his 



igO SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

immorality that one has to complain of, and the 
talk in the books on that score is mostly foolish- 
ness; it is rather his bad taste. He cannot be much 
blamed for his estrangement from his wife, and 
his care for her comfort is not a little to his credit; 
but he might have refrained from writing to Eliza 
on the happiness they were to enjoy when the 
poor woman was dead— as he had already done 
to Mile. Fourmantelle, and others, too, it may be. 
Mrs. Sterne, not long after the departure of Eliza, 
had written that she was coming over to England, 
and the your7ial for a time is filled with forebod- 
ings of the confusion she was to bring with her. 
One hardly knows whether to smile or drop a 
tear over the Postscript added after the last regu- 
lar entry : 

Nov : i?f All my dearest Eliza has turnd out more 
favourable than my hopes— M!^ S.— & my dear Girl have 
been 2 Months with me and they have this day left me 
to go to spend the Winter at York, after having settled 
every thing to their hearts content— M^^ vSterne retires 
into france, whence she purposes not to stir, till her 
death. — & never, has she vow'd, will give me another 
sorrowful or discontented hour — I have conquerd her, 
as I w? every one else, by humanity & Generosity— & 
she leaves me, more than half in lyove w^'^ me — She goes 
into the South of france, her health being insupportable 
in England— & her age, as she now confesses ten Years 
more, than I thought being on the edge of sixty— so God 
bless— & make the remainder of her Life happy— in 
order to w<=^ I am to remit her three hundred guineas a 
year— & give my dear Girl two thousand p^s — w"? w'^l' all 



LAURENCE STERNE I9I 

Joy, I agree to, — but tis to be sunk into an annuity in 
the french Loans — 

— And now Eliza! Let me talk to thee — But What 
can I say, What can I write — But the Yearnings of heart 
wasted with looking & wishing for thy Return — Return 
— Return ! my dear Eliza ! May heaven smooth the 
Way for thee to send thee safely to us, & joy for Ever, 

So ends the famous Journal, which at last we 
are permitted to read with all its sins upon it. 
And I think the first observation that will occur 
to every reader is surprise that a master of style 
could write such slipshod, almost illiterate, Eng- 
lish. The fact is a good many of the writers of 
the day were content to leave all minor matters 
of grammar and orthography to their printer, 
whom it was then the fashion to abuse. More 
than one page of stately English out of that formal 
age would look as queer as Sterne's hectic scrib- 
blings, could we see the original manuscript. But 
the ill taste of it all is quite as apparent, and un- 
fortunately no printer could expunge that fault, 
along with his haphazard punctuation, from 
Sterne's published works. In another way 
his incongruous calling as a priest may be re- 
sponsible for a note that particularly jars upon us 
to-day. Too often in the midst of very earthly 
sentiments he breaks forth with a bit of reli- 
gious claptrap, as when in the Joiiryial he cries 
out, "Great God of Mercy! shorten the Space be- 
twixt us — Shorten the space of our miseries! " — 
or as when, in that letter to I^ady Percy which so 



192 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

disgusted Thackeray, he dandles his temptations, 
and in the same breath tells how he has repeated 
the Lord's Prayer for the sake of deliverance from 
them. Again, I say, it is a matter of taste, for 
there is no reason to believe that Yorick's religious 
feelings were not just as sincere, and as volatile, 
too, as his love-making. They sometimes came 
to him at an inopportune moment. 

" Un pretre corrumpu ne Test jamais a demi '* 
— a priest is never only half corrupt — said Massil- 
lon, and there are times when such a saying is 
true. It is also true, and Sterne's life is witness 
thereof, that in certain ages, when compassion 
and tenderness of heart have taken the place of 
religion's austerer virtues, a man may preach with 
conviction on Sunday, and on Monday join with- 
out much disquiet of conscience in the revelries 
of a " Crazy ' ' Castle. There is not a great deal 
for the moralist to say on such a life; it is a mat- 
ter for the historian to explain. At Cambridge 
Sterne had made the acquaintance of John Hall 
Stevenson, the owner of Skelton, or "Crazy," 
Castle, which lay at Guisborough, within con- 
venient reach of Sterne's Yorkshire homes. An 
excellent engraving in the present edition gives a 
fair notion of this fantastic dwelling before its 
restoration. On a fringe of land between the 
edge of what seems a stagnant pool and the foot 
of some barren hills, the old pile of stone sits dull 
and lowering. First comes a double terrace rising 
sheer from the water, and above that a rambling, 



LAURENCE STERNE 193 

comfortless-looking structure, pierced in the upper 
story by a few solemn windows. Terraces and 
building alike are braced with outstanding but- 
tresses, as if, like the House of Usher, the ancient 
edifice might some day split and crumble away 
into the lake. At one end of the pile is a heavy 
square tower erected long ago for defence; at the 
other stands a slender octagonal turret with its 
famous weathercock, by whose direction the owner 
regulated his mood for the day. The whole bears 
an aspect of bleakness and solitude, in startling 
contrast with the wild doings of host and guests. 
A study yet to be made is a history of the clubs 
or associations of the eighteenth century, which, 
in imitation, no doubt, of the newly instituted 
Masonic rites, were formed for the purpose of 
adding the sting of a fraternal secrecy to the 
commonplace pleasures of dissipation. Famous 
among these were the " Monks of Medmenham 
Abbey," and the " Hell-Fire Club," and to a less 
degree the " Demoniacs" whom Hall Stevenson 
gathered into his notorious abode. If Sterne 
found his amusement in this boisterous assembly, 
it is charitable (and the evidence points this way) 
to suppose that he enjoyed the jovial wit and gro- 
tesque pranks of such a company rather than its 
viciousness. It is at least remarkable that Hall 
Stevenson, or " Eugenius," as Sterne called him, 
seems to have tried to steady the eccentric divine 
by more than one piece of practical advice. Above 
all, there lay at Skelton a great collection of 

VOL. III. — 13. ^ 



194 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

Rabelaisian books, brought together by the 
owner during his tours on the Continent ; and to 
this Sterne owed his eccentric reading and that ac- 
quaintance with the world's humours and whim- 
sicalities which were to make his fortune. 

Here, then, in the library of his compromising 
friend, he gathered the material for his great 
work, Tristram Shandy; and, indeed, if we credit 
some scholars, he gathered so successfully that 
little was left for his own creative talents. It is 
demonstrably true that he made extraordinary 
use of certain old French books, including Rabe- 
lais, whom he counted with Cervantes as his 
master; and from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy 
he borrowed unblushingly, not to mention other 
English authors. We are shocked at first to 
learn that «5ome of his choicest passages are stolen 
goods; the recording angel's tear was shed, it 
appears, and my Uncle Toby's fly was released 
long before that gentleman was born to sweeten 
the world; so too the wind was tempered to the 
shorn lamb in proverb before Sterne ever added 
that text to the stock of biblical quotations. But 
after all, there is little to be gained by unearthing 
these plagiarisms. Tristram Shandy and the 
Sentimental yourney still remain among the most 
original productions in the language, and we are 
only taught once more that genius has a high- 
handed way of taking its own where it finds it. 

The fact is that this trick of borrowing scarcely 
does more than affect a few of those set pieces or 



LAURENCE STERNE I95 

purple patches by which an author like Sterne 
gradually comes to be known and judged. These 
are admirably adapted for use in anthologies, for 
they may be severed from their context without 
cutting a single artery or nerve; but let no one 
suppose that from reading them he gets anything 
but a distorted view of Sterne's work. They are 
all marked by a peculiar kind of artificial pathos 
— the recording angel's tear, Uncle Toby's fly, 
the dead ass, the caged starling, Maria of 
Moulines (I name them as they occur to me) 
— and they give a very imperfect notion of the 
true Shandean flavour. In their own genre 
they are no doubt masterpieces, but it is a genre 
which gives pleasure from the perception of the 
art, and not from the kindling touch of nature, 
in their execution. They are ostensibly pathetic, 
yet they make no appeal to the heart, and I 
doubt if a tear was every shed over any of them — • 
even by the lachrymose Yorick himself. To en- 
joy them properly one must key his mind to that 
state in which the emotions cease to have validity 
in themselves, and are changed into a kind of ex- 
quisite convention. Now, it is easier by far to 
detect the inherent insubstantiality of such a con- 
vention than to appreciate its delicately balanced 
beauty, and thus it happens that we hear so much 
of Sterne's false sentiment from those who base 
their criticism primarily on these famous episodes. 
For my part I am almost inclined to place the 
story of Le Fevre in this class, and to wonder 



196 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

if those who call it pathetic really mean that it 
has touched their heart ; I am sure it never cost 
me a sigh. 

No, the highest mastery of Sterne does not lie 
in these anthological patches, but first of all in 
his power of creating characters. There are not 
many persons engaged in the little drama of 
Shandy Hall, and their range of action is narrow, 
but they are drawn with a skill and a memorable 
distinctness which have never been surpassed. 
Not the bustling people of Shakespeare's stage 
are more real and individual than Mr. Shandy, 
my Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and Dr. Slop. 
Even the minor characters of the servants' hall 
are sketched in with wonderful vividness; and if 
there is a single failure in all that gallery of por- 
traits, it is Yorick himself, who was drawn from 
the author and is foisted upon the company some- 
what unceremoniously, if truth be told. Nor is 
the secret of their lifelikeness hard to discern. 
One of the constant creeds of the age, handed 
down from the old comedy of humours, was the 
belief in the " ruling passion " as the source of all 
a man's acts. The persons who figure in most 
of the contemporary letters and novels are a suc- 
cession of originals or grotesques, moved by a 
single motive. They are all mad in England, 
said Hamlet, and Walpole enforces the sentence 
with a thousand burlesque anecdotes. Now in 
Sterne this ruling passion, both in his own char- 
acter and in that of his creations, was softened 



LAURENCE STERNE I97 

down to what may be called a whimsical egotism, 
which does not repel by its exaggeration, yet be- 
stows a marvellous unity and relief. It is his 
hobbyhorsical philosophy, as he calls it. At the 
head of all are Tristram's father and uncle, with 
their cunningh^ contrasted humours — Mr. Shandy, 
who would regulate all the affairs of life by ab- 
stract theorems of the mind, and my Uncle Toby, 
who is guided solely by the impulses of the heart. 
Between them Sterne would seem to have set over 
against each other the two divided sources of hu- 
man activity; and the minor characters, each with 
his cherished hobby, are ranged under them in 
proper subordination. The art of the narrative — • 
and in this Sterne is without master or rival — is 
to bring these characters into a group by some 
common motive, and then to show how each of 
them is thinking all the while of his own dear 
crotchet. Take, for example, the tremendous 
curse of Ernulphus in the third book. Mr. 
Shandy had "the greatest veneration in the 
world for that gentleman, who, in distrust of his 
own discretion in this point, sat down and com- 
posed (that is, at his leisure) fit forms of swearing 
suitable to all cases, from the lowest to the highest 
provocation which could possibly happen to him." 
That is Mr. Shandy's theorising hobby, and ac- 
cordingly, when his man Obadiah is the cause of 
an annoying mishap, Mr. Shandy reaches down 
the formal curse of Bishop Ernulphus and hands 
it to Dr. Slop to read. It might seem tedious to 



198 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

have seven pages of excommunicative wrath 
thrust upon you, with the Latin text duly written 
out on the opposite page. On the contrary-, this 
is one of the more entertaining scenes of the book, 
for at every step one or another of the listeners 
throws in an exclamation which intimates how 
the words are falling in with his own peculiar 
train of thought. The result is a delightful cross- 
section of human nature, as it actually exists. 
"Our armies swore terribly in Flanders, cried my 
Uncle Toby — but nothing to this. — For my own 
part, I could not have a heart to curse my dog 
so." 

But it is not this persistent and ver>' human 
egotism alone which makes the good people of 
Shandy Hall so real to us, Sterne is the originator 
and master of the gesture and the attitude. Like 
a skilful player of puppets, he both puts words 
into the mouths of his creatures and pulls the 
wires that move them. No one has ever ap- 
proached him in the art with which he carries 
out every mood of the heart and every fancy of the 
brain into the most minute and precise posturing. 
Before Corporal Trim reads the sermon his exact 
attitude is described so that, as the author says, 
" a statuar>' might have modelled from it." 
Throughout all the dialogue between the two 
contrasted brothers we follow every movement of 
the speakers, as if we sat with them in the flesh, 
and when Mr. Shandy breaks his pipe the moment 
is tense with expectation. But the supreme ex- 



LAU RENTE STERNE 1 99 

hibition of this art occurs at the announcement of 
Bobb5-'s death. Let us leave Mr. Shandy and m}^ 
Uncle Tob}- discoursing over this sad event, and 
turn to the kitchen. Those who know the scene 
may pass on: 

My young master in London is dead ! said Oba- 

diah, — 

A green sattin night-gown of my mother's, which 

had been twice scoured, was the first idea which Oba- 
diah's exclamation brought into Susannah's head. . . . 

— O ! 'twill be the death of my poor mistress, cried 
Susannah. — My mother's whole wardrobe followed. — 
What a procession ! her red damask, — her orange tawney, 
— her white and yellow lutestrings, — her brown taffata, — 
her bone-laced caps, her bed-gowns, and comfortable 
imder-petticoats. — Not a rag was left behind. — "^V<9, — she 
will never look up again," said Susannah. 

We had a fat, foolish scullion — my father, I think, 
kept her for her simplicity; — she had been all autumn 
struggling with a dropsy. — He is dead, said Obadiah, — 
he is certainly dead ! — So am not I, said the foolish 
scullion. 

Here is sad news. Trim, cried Susannah, wiping 

her eyes as Trijn stepp'd into the kitchen, — master 
Bobby is dead and buried — the funeral was an interpola- 
tion of Susannah's — we shall have all to go into mourn- 
ing, said Susannah. 

1 hope not, said Trim. — Yon hope not ! cried Susannah 
earnestly. — The mourning ran not in Trim's head, what- 
ever it did in Susannah's. — I hope — said Trim, explain- 
ing himself, I hope in God the news is not true — I heard 
the letter read with my own ears, answered Obadiah; 
and we shall have a terrible piece of work of it in 
stubbing the Ox-moor.— Oh ! he 's dead, said Susannah. 
— As sure, said the scullion, as I 'm alive. 



200 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

I lament for hitn from my heart and my soul, said 
Trim, fetching a sigh. — Poor creature ! — poor boy ! — 
poor gentleman ! 

— He was alive last Whitsontide ! said the coachman. — 
Whitsontide ! alas ! cried Trim, extending his right 
arm, and falling instantly into the same attitude in which 
he read the sermon, — what is Whitsontide, Jonatha7i (for 
that was the coachman's name), or Shrovetide, or any 
tide or time past, to this? Are we not here now, con- 
tinued the corporal (striking the end of his stick perpen- 
dicularly upon the floor, so as to give an idea of health 
and stability) — and are we not — (dropping his hat upon 
the ground) gone! in a moment! — 'T was infinitely 
striking ! Susannah burst into a flood of tears. — We are 
not stocks and stones.— Jonathan, Obadiah, the cook- 
maid, all melted. — The foolish fat scullion herself, who 
was scouring a fish-kettle upon her knees, was rous'd 
with it. — The whole kitchen crowded about the corporal. 



There is the true Sterne, A common happen- 
ing unites a half-dozen people in a sympathetic 
group, yet all the while each of them is living his 
individual life. You may look far and wide, but 
you will find nothing quite comparable to that fat, 
foolish scullion. And withal there is no touch of 
cynical satire in this display of egotism, but a 
kindly, quizzical sense of the way in which our 
human personalities are jumbled together in this 
strange world. And in the end the feeling that 
lies covered up in the heart of each, the feeling 
that all of us carry dumbly in the inevitable pres- 
ence of death, is conveyed in that supreme gesture 
of Corporal Trim's, whose force in the book is 



LAURENCE STERNE 20I 

magnified by the author's fantastic disquisition on 
its precise nature and significance. 

It begins to grow clear, I think, that we have 
here something more than an ordinary tale in 
which a few individuals are set apart to enact their 
r6Ies. Somehow, this quaint household in the 
countrj^ where nothing more important is hap- 
pening than the birth of a child, becomes a symbol 
of the great world with all its tangle of cross- 
purposes. There is a philosophy, a new and dis- 
tinct vision of the meaning of life, in these scenes, 
which makes of Sterne something larger than a 
mere novelist. He was not indulging his author's 
vanity when he thought of himself as a follower 
of Rabelais and Cervantes and Swift, for he be- 
longs with them rather than with his great con- 
temporaries, Fielding and SmoUet, or his greater 
successors, Thackeray and Dickens. Nor is his 
exact parentage hard to discover. In Rabelais I 
seem to see the embryonic humour of a world 
coming to the birth and not j^et fully formed. 
Through the crust of the old mediaeval ideals the 
new humanism was struggling to emerge, and in 
its first lusty liberty mankind, with the clog of the 
old civilisation still hanging upon it, was like 
those monsters that Nature threw ofi" when she 
was preparing her hand for a higher creation. 
There is something unshaped, as of Milton's 
beast wallowing unwieldy, in the creatures of 
Rabelais's brain; yet withal one perceives the 
pride of the design that is foreshadowed and will 



202 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

some day come to its own. Cervantes arose in the 
full tide of humanism, and there is about his 
humour the pathetic regret for an ideal that has 
been swept aside by the new forms. For this 
young civilisation, which spurned so haughtily 
the ancient law of humiliation and which was to 
be satisfied with the full and uncoufined develop- 
ment of pure human nature, had a pitiful incom- 
pleteness to all but a few of Fortune's minions, 
and the memory of the past haunted the brain of 
Cervantes like a ghost vanquished and made 
ridiculous, but unwilling to depart. He found 
therein the tragic humour of man's ideal life. 
Then came Swift. Into his heart he sucked the 
bitterness of a thousand disappointments. Even 
the semblance of the old ideals had passed away, 
and for the fair promise of the new world he saw 
only corruption and folly and a gigantic egotism 
stalking in the disguise of liberty. Savage in- 
dignation laid hold of him and he vented his rage 
in that mocking laughter which stings the ears 
like a buffet. His was the sardonic humour. 
But time that takes away brings also its compen- 
sation. To Sterne, living among smaller men, 
these passionate egotisms are dwindled to mere 
caprices, and a jest becomes more appropriate 
than a sneer. And after all, one good thing is 
left. There is the kindly heart and the humble 
acknowledgment that we too are seeking our own 
petty ends. It is a world of homely chance into 
which Sterne introduces us, and there is no room 



LAURENCE STERNE 203 

in it for the boisterous mirth or the tragedy or 
wrath of his predecessors. His humour is merely 
whimsical; his smile is almost a caress. 

I can never look at that portrait of Sterne by 
Sir Joshua Reynolds, with the head thrown for- 
ward and the index finger of the right hand laid 
upon the forehead, but an extraordinary fantasy 
enters my mind. I seem to see one of those pic- 
tures of the Renaissance, in which the face of the 
Almighty beams benevolently out of the sky, but 
as I gaze, the features gradually change into those 
of Yorick. The mouth assumes the sly smile, 
and the eyes twinkle with conscious merriment, 
as if they were saying, " We know, you and 
I, but we won't tell ! ' ' Possibly it is something in 
the pose of Sir Joshua's picture which lends itself 
to this transformation, helped by a feeling that the 
Shandean world, over which Sterne presides, is at 
times as real as the actualities that surround us. 
That portrait at the head of his works is, so to 
speak, an image of His Sacred Majesty, Chance, 
whom a witty Frenchman reverenced as the genius 
of this world. 

It may be that we do not always in our im- 
patience recognise how artfully the caprices of 
Sterne's manner are adapted to creating this at- 
mosphere of illusion. Now and then his trick of 
reaching a point by the longest way round, his 
wanton interruptions, the absurdity of his blank 
pages, and other cheap devices to appear original, 
grow a trifle wearisome, and we call the author a 



204 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

mountebank for his pains. Yet was there ever a 
great book without its tedious flats ? They would 
seem to be necessary to procure the proper per- 
pective. Certainly all these whimsicalities of 
Sterne's manner fall in admirably with the central 
theme of Tristram Shandy, which is nothing else 
but an exposition of the way in which the blind 
goddess Chance, whose hobby-horse is this world 
itself, makes her plaything of the lesser caprices 
of mankind, " I have been the continual sport 
of what the world calls Fortune," cries Tristram 
at the beginning of his narrative, and indeed that 
deity laid her designs early against our hero, 
whose troubles date from the very day of concep- 
tion. " I see it plainly," says Mr. Shandy, in his 
chapter of lyamentation, when calamity had suc- 
ceeded calamity—" I see it plainly, that either for 
my own sins, brother Toby, or the sins and follies 
of the Shandy family, Heaven has thought fit to 
draw forth the heaviest of its artillery against me; 
and the prosperity of my child is the point upon 
which the whole force of it is directed to play." — 
" Such a thing would batter the whole universe 
about our ears," replies my Uncle Toby, thinking 
no doubt of the terrible work of the artillery in 
Flanders. Mr. Shandy was a man of ideas, and 
Tristram was to be the embodiment of a theory. 
But alas, — " with all my precautions how was my 
system turned topside-turvy in the womb with my 
child!" There is something inimitably droll in 
this combat between the solemn, pedantic notions 



LAURENCE STERNE 20$ 

of Mr. Shandy and the blunders of Chance. The 
interrupted conception of poor Tristram, his un- 
fortunate birth, the crushing of his nose, the gro- 
tesque mistake in naming him, — all are scenes in 
this ludicrous and prolonged warfare. Nor is my 
Uncle Toby any the less a subject of Fortune's 
sport. There is, to begin with, a comical incon- 
sistency between the feminine tenderness of his 
heart and his absorption in the memories of war. 
His hobby of living through in miniature the 
campaign of the army in Flanders is one of the 
kindliest satires on human ambition ever penned. 
And it was inevitable that my Uncle Toby, with 
his " most extreme and unparalleled modesty of 
nature," should in the end have fallen a victim 
to the designs of a woman like the Widow Wad- 
man. It is, as I have said, this underlying philoso- 
phy worked out in every detail of the book which 
makes of Tristram Sha?idy something more than 
a mere comedy of manners. It shatters the whole 
world of convention before our eyes and rebuilds 
it according to the humour of a mad Yorkshire 
parson. And all of us at times, I think, may 
find our pleasure and a lesson of human frailty, 
too, by entering for a while into the concerns of 
that Shandean society. 

Sterne, on one side of his character, was a senti- 
mentalist. That, and little more than that, we 
see in his letters and yournal. And in a form, 
subtilised no doubt to a kind of exquisite felicity, 
that is the essence of his Scntimeyital Journey, as 



2o6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

the uame implies. He was indeed the first author 
to use the word "sentimental" in its modern sig- 
nificance, and for one reason and another this was 
the trait of his writing that was able, as the 
French would say, to /aire ecole. It flooded Eng- 
lish hterature with tearful trash like Mackenzie's 
Ma7i of Feeling, and, in a happier manner, it in- 
fluenced even Thackeray more than he would 
have been willing to admit. It is present in 
Tristram Shandy, but only as a milder and half- 
concealed flavour, subduing the satire of that 
travesty to the uses of a genial and sympathetic 
humour. 

Probably, however, the imputation of senti- 
meutalism repels fewer readers from Sterne to-day 
than that of immorality. It is a charge easily 
flung, and in part deserved. And yet, in all 
honesty, are we not prone to fall into cant when- 
ever this topic is broached ? I was reading in a 
family edition of Rabelais the other day and came 
across this sentence in the introduction: "After 
wading through the worst of Rabelais' s work, one 
needs a thorough bath and a change of raiment, 
but after Sterne one needs strychnine and iron 
and a complete change of blood." It does not 
seem to me that the case with Sterne is quite so 
bad as that. Rabelais wrote when the human 
passions were emerging from restraint, and it was 
part of his humour to paint the lusty youth of the 
world in colours of grotesque exaggeration. 
Sterne, coming in an age of conventional man- 



LAURENCE STERNE 20/ 

ners, pointed slyly to the gross and untamed 
thoughts that lurked in the minds of men beneath 
all their stiffened decorum. It was the purpose 
of his " topside- turvydom," as it was of Rabe- 
lais's, to turn the under side of human nature up 
to the light, and to show how Fortune smiles at 
the social proprieties; but his instrument was 
necessarily innuendo instead of boisterous rib- 
aldry, Shandeism in place of Pantagruelism. De- 
liberately he employed this art of insinuation in 
such a way as to draw the reader on to look for 
hidden meanings where none really exists. We 
are made an unwilling accomplice in his obscen- 
ity, and this perhaps, though a legitimate device, 
is the most objectionable feature of his suggest- 
ive style. 

One may concede so much and yet dislike such 
broad accusations of immorality as are sometimes 
laid against him. I cannot see what harm can 
come to a mature mind from either Rabelais or 
Sterne. And if Xhe piicris reverentia be taken as 
the criterion (the effect actually produced on those 
who are as yet unformed, for good or ill, by the 
experience of life) I am inclined to think that the 
really dangerous books are those like the Venus 
and Adonis, which throw the colours of a glowing 
imagination over what is in itself perfectly natural 
and wholesome; I am inclined to think that 
Shakespeare has debauched more immature minds 
than ever Sterne could do, and that even Panta- 
gruelism is more inflammatory than Shandeism. 



208 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

So far as morals alone are concerned there is a 
touch of what may be called inverted cant in this 
discrimination between the wholesome and the 
unwholesome. Sir Walter Scott, in his straight- 
forward, manly way, put the matter right once for 
all: " It cannot be said that the licentious humour 
of Tnst?'am Shandy is of the kind which applies 
itself to the passions, or is calculated to corrupt 
society. But it is a sin against taste if allowed 
to be harmless as to morals, ' ' The question with 
Sterne's writings, as with his life, is not so much 
one of morality as of taste. And if we admit that 
he occasionally sinned against these inexorable 
laws, this does not mean that his book as a whole 
was ill or foully conceived. He merely erred at 
times by excess of his method. 

The first two volumes of Tristram Shandy were 
written in 1759, when Sterne was forty-six, and 
were advertised for sale in London on the first 
day of the year following, Like many another 
too original work, it had first to go a-begging for 
a publisher, but the effect of it on the great world, 
when once it became known, was prodigious. 
The author soon followed his book to the city to 
reap his reward, and the story of his fame in 
London during his annual visits and of his re- 
ception in Paris reads like enchantment. " My 
Lodging," he writes to his dear Kitty in the first 
flush of triumph, "is euery hour full of your 
Great People of the first Rank, who striue who 
shall most honor me; — euen all the Bishops have 



LAURENCE STERNE 209 

sent their Complim'.' to me, & I set out on Mon- 
day Morning to pay my Visits to them all. I am 
to dine w*? Lord Chesterfield this Week, &c. &c., 
and next Sunday h"^- Rockingham takes me to 
Court." Nor was his reward confined to the 
empty plaudits of society. Lord Falconberg pre- 
sented him with the perpetual curacy of Coxwold, 
a comfortable charge not twenty miles from Sut- 
ton. The " proud priest" Warburton sent him 
a purse of gold, because (so the story ran, but it 
may well have been idle slander) he had heard 
that Sterne contemplated introducing him into a 
later volume as the tutor of Tristram. 

Sterne planned to bring out two successive 
volumes each year for the remainder of his life, 
and the number did actually run to nine without 
getting Tristram much beyond his childhood's 
misadventures. At different times, also, he pub- 
lished two volumes of Sermons by Mr. Yo7'ick, 
which, in their own way, and considered as moral 
essays rather than as theological discourses, are 
worthy of a study in themselves. They are for 
one thing almost the finest example in English 
of that style which follows the sinuosities and 
subtle transitions of the spoken word. 

But soon his health, always delicate, began to 
give way under the strain of reckless living. 
Long vacations in Paris and the South of France 
restored his strength temporarily, and at the same 
time gave him material for the travel scenes in 
Tristram Shandy and for the Sentimental J ourney . 

VOL. m. — 14. 



2IO SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

But that "vile asthma" was never long absent, 
and there is something pitiable in the quips 
and jests with which he covers his dread of the 
spectre that was pursuing him. We have seen 
how the travail of his broken body wails in 
the Journal to Eliza; and his last letter, writ- 
ten from his lodging in I^ondon to his truest 
and least equivocal friend, was, as Thackeray- 
says, a plea for pity and pardon: " Do, dear Mrs. 
J[ames], entreat him to come to-morrow, or next 
day, for perhaps I have not many days, or hours 
to live — I want to ask a favour of him, if I find 
myself worse — that I shall beg of you, if in this 
wrestling I come ofi" conqueror — my spirits are 
fled — 't is a bad omen— do not weep my dear Lady 
— your tears are too precious to shed for me — • 
bottle them up, and may the cork never be drawn. 
— Dearest, kindest, gentlest, and best of women! 
may health, peace, and happiness prove your 
handmaids. — If I die, cherish the remembrance of 
me, and forget the foUies which you so often con- 
demn'd — which my heart, not my head, betray'd 
me into. Should my child, my Lydia want a 
mother, may I hope you will (if she is left parent- 
less) take her to your bosom ? " — I cannot but feel 
that the man who wrote that note was kind and 
good at heart, and that through all his wayward 
tricks and sham sentiment, as through the inco- 
herence of his untrimmed language, there ran a 
vein of genuine sweetness. 

He sent this appeal from Bond Street, on Tues- 



LAURENCE STERNE 211 

day, the 15th of March, 1768. On Friday, the 
i8th, a party of his roistering friends, nobles and 
actors and gay livers, were having a grand dinner 
in a street near by, when some one in the midst 
of their frolic mentioned that Sterne was lying ill 
in his chamber. They dispatched a footman to 
inquire of their old merry-maker, and this is the 
report that he wrote in later years; it is unique in 
its terrible simplicity: 

About this time, Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, 
■was taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street. 
He was sometimes called " Tristram Shandy," and some- 
time "Yorick"; a very great favourite of the gentle- 
men's. One day my master had company to dinner, 
who were speaking about him; the Duke of Roxburgh, 
the Earl of March, the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of 
Grafton, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hume, and Mr. James. 
"John," said my master, "go and inquire how Mr. 
Sterne is to-day." I went, returned, and said: I went to 
Mr. Sterne's lodging ; the mistress opened the door ; I 
inquired how he did. She told me to go up to the nurse; 
I went into the room, and he was just a-dying. I waited 
ten minutes; but in five he said, "Now it is come!" 
He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died in 
a minute. The gentlemen were all very sorry, and 
lamented him very much. 

We have seen Corporal Trim in the kitchen 
dropping his hat as a symbol of man's quick and 
humiliating collapse, but I think the attitude of 
poor Yorick himself lying in his hired chamber, 
with hand upraised to stop the invisible blow, a 



212 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

work of greater and still more astounding genius. 
It was devised by the Master of gesture indeed, 
by him whose puppets move on a wider stage 
than that of Shandy Hall. 



J. HENRY SHORTHOUSK 

Probably few people expected a work of more 
than mediocre interest when they heard that Mrs. 
Shorthouse was preparing her husband's Letters 
and Literary Remains for the the press. ' The life 
of a Birmingham merchant, who in the course of 
his evenings elaborated one rather mystical novel 
and then a few paler and abbreviated shadows of 
it, did not, indeed, promise a great deal, and there 
is something to make one shudder in the very 
sound of " literary remains." Nor would it have 
been reassuring to know that these remains were 
for the most part short essays and stories read at 
the social meetings of the Friends' Essay Society 
of Birmingham. The manuscript records of such 
a club are not a source to which one would natur- 
ally look for exhilarating literature, yet from 
them, let me say at once, the editor has drawn a 
volume both interesting and valuable. Mr. Short- 
house contributed to these meetings for some 
twenty years, from the age of eighteen until he 
withdrew to concentrate his energies upon yohn 
Inglesant, and it is worthy of notice that his early 

' Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of J. H. Short- 
house. Edited by his wife. In two volumes. New 
York: The Macmillaa Co., 1905. 

213 



214 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

sketches are, on the whole, better work than the 
more elaborate essays, such as that on The Platoft- 
ism of Wordsworth, which followed the production 
of his masterpiece. He was to an extraordinary- 
degree homo 7inius libri, almost of a single thought, 
and there is a certain freshness in his immature 
presentation of that idea which was lost after it 
once received the stamp of definitive expression. 
Hawthorne, we already knew, furnished the 
model for his later method, but we feel a pleasant 
shock, such as always accompanies the perception 
of some innate consistency, on opening to the very 
first sentence in his volume of Remains, and find- 
ing the master's name: " I have been all my life 
what Nathaniel Hawthorne calls ' a devoted epi- 
cure of my own emotions.' " That, I suppose, 
was written about 1854, when Hawthorne's first 
long romance had been published scarcely four 
years, and shows a remarkable power in the 
young disciple of finding his literary kinship. 
Indeed, not the least of his resemblances to Haw- 
thorne is the fact that he seems from the first to 
have possessed a native sense of style; what other 
men toil for was theirs by right of birth. In the 
earliest of these sketches the cadenced rhythms 
of yohn Inglesant are already present, lacking a 
little, perhaps, in the perfect assurance that came 
later, but still unmistakable. And at times — in 
The Autumn Walk, for instance, with its "attempt 
to find language for nameless sights and voices," 
in Su7idays at the Seaside, with their benediction 



J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 21$ 

of outpoured light upon the waters, ofifering to 
the beholder as it were the sacrament of beautj'-, 
or in the Recollections of a London Church , — at 
times, I say, we seem almost to be reading some 
lost or discarded chapter of the finished romance. 
This closing paragraph of the Recollections, written 
apparently when Shorthouse was not much more 
than a boy — might it not be a memory of King 
Charles's cavalier himself? — 

Certes, it was very strange that the story of this young 
girl whom I have never seen, whom I knew so little of, 
should haunt me thus. Yet for her sake I loved the 
church and the trees and even the dark and dingy houses 
round about ; and as with the small congregation I list- 
ened to the refrain of that sublime litany which sounded 
forth, word for word, as she had heard it, I thought it all 
the more divine because I knew so certainly that in her 
days of trouble and affliction it had supported and com- 
forted her : 

By Thine agony and bloody sweat ; by Thy cross and 
passion ; by Thy precious death and burial ; by Thy 
glorious resurrection and ascension ; and by the coming 
of the Holy Ghost, Good Lord deliver us. 

And the Life, too, in an unpretentious way, is 
decidedly more interesting than might have been 
expected. The narrative is simply told, and the 
letters are for the most part quiet expositions of 
the idea that dominated the writer's mind. Here 
and there comes the gracious record of some day 
of shimmering lights among the Welsh hills; — "a 
wonderful vision of sea and great mountains in a 



2l6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

pale white mist trembling into blue,"as he writes 
to Mr. Gosse from Llandudno, and we know we 
are with the author of John Inglesant. Joseph 
Henry Shorthouse was born in Birmingham on 
September 9th, 1834. His parents belonged to the 
Society of Friends, and the boy's first schooling 
was at the house of a lady who belonged to the 
same body. He was, however, of an extremely 
sensitive and timid disposition, and even the ex- 
citement of this homelike school affected him de- 
plorably. " I have now," says his wife, " the old 
copy of lyindley Murray's spelling book which he 
used there. His mother saw, to her dismay, 
when she heard him repeat the few small words 
of his lesson, that his face worked painfull}-, and 
his little nervous fingers had worn away the bot- 
tom edges of his book, and that he was beginning 
to stammer." He was immediately taken from 
school, but the afi'ectiou of stammering remained 
with him through life and cut him oflF from much 
active intercourse with the world. He acknow- 
ledged that without it he would probably never 
have found time for his studies and productive 
work, and the eloquence of his pen was due in 
part to the lameness of his tongue. At a later 
date he went for a while to Tottenham College, 
but his real education he got from tutors and still 
more from his own insatiable love of books. 

It appears that all his family associations were 
of a kind to foster the peculiar talents that were to 
bring him fame. His father while dressing used 



J, HENRY SHORTHOUSE 217 

to tell the boy of his travels in Italy, and so im- 
bued him with a love for that wonderful country 
which he himself was never to see. In after 
years, when the elder Shorthouse came to read 
his son's novel, he was surprised and delighted 
to find the scenes he had described all written out 
with extraordinary accuracy. Even more bene- 
ficial was the influence of his grandmother, Re- 
becca Shorthouse, and her home at Moseley, 
where every Thursday young Henry and his four 
girl cousins, the Southalls, used to foregather and 
spend the day. One of the cousins has left a 
record of this garden estate and of these weekly 
visits which might have been written by Short- 
house himself, so illuminated is it with that sub- 
dued radiance which rests upon all his works. I 
could wish it were permissible to quote at even 
greater length from these pages, for they are the 
best possible preparation for an understanding of 
"jfohn big le sunt : 

The old house at Moseley . . . was surrounded by 
a large extent of garden ground and ample lawns. The 
gardens were on different levels — the upper was the 
flower garden. No gardener with his dozens of bedding 
plants molested that fragrant solitude, but there, unhin- 
dered, the narcissus multiplied into sheets of bloom, the 
little yellow rose embodied the summer suushine, the 
white roses climbed into the old apple trees, or looked 
cut from the depths of the ivy, and we knew the sweet- 
briar was there, though we saw it not. 

Below, but accessible by stone steps, lay the low gar- 
den, surrounded by brick lichen-covered walls, beyond 



2l8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

which rose banks of trees. [The "blue door" in this 
garden wall is introduced in the Countess Eve, and an- 
other part of the garden in Sir PercivalJ] On these old 
walls nectarines, peaches, and apricots ripened in the 
August sun. In the upper part of this walled garden 
stretched a winding lawn, made in the shape of a letter 
S, and surrounded on all sides by laurels. This was a 
complete seclusion. In the broad light of noon, when 
the lilacs and laburnums and guelder-roses were full of 
bees, and each laurel leaf, as if newly burnished, reflected 
the glorious sunshine, it was a delicious solitude, where 
we read, or talked, or thought, to our hearts' content. 
But as night fell, when " the laurels' pattering talk was 
over," there was a deep solemnity in its dark shadows, 
and in its stillness and loneliness. 

Qualis ab incepto! Are we not in fancy carried 
straightway to that scene where the boy Iriglesant 
goes back to his first schoolmaster, whom he finds 
sitting amid his flowers, and who tells him marvel- 
lous things concerning the search for the Divine 
lyight ? or to that other scene, where he talks with 
Dr. Henry More in the garden of Oulton, and 
hears that rare Platonist discourse on the glories 
of the visible world, saying: " I am in fact 'Incola 
coeliin terrd,' an inhabitant of paradise and heaven 
upon earth; and I may soberly confess that some- 
times, walking abroad after my studies, I have 
been almost mad with pleasure, — the effect of 
nature upon my soul having been inexpressibly 
ravishing, and beyond what I can convey to 
you." Indeed, not only yohn Liglesant, but all 
of Mr. Shorthouse's stories could not be better 



J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 219 

described than as a writing out at large of the 
wistful memory of that time when men heard the 
voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in 
the cool of the day — and were still not afraid. 
But we must not pass on without observing the 
more individual traits of the boy noted down in 
the record: 

That whicli strikes one most in recalling our inter- 
course with our cousin at this time is that our conversa- 
tion did not consist of commonplaces ; we talked for 
hours on literary subjects, or, if persons were under dis- 
cussion, they were such as had a real interest ; the books 
we were reading were the chief theme. The low garden 
was generally the scene of these conversations, and it 
was here we read and talked all through the long sum- 
mer afternoons. . . . Nathaniel Hawthorne had a 
perennial charm,— his influence on our cousin was per- 
manent, — and we turned from all other books to Haw- 
thorne's with fresh delight. There is in existence a 
well-worn copy of the Tivice- Told Tales that was seldom 
out of our hands. [It is in the Preface to this book that 
Hawthorne boasts of being " the obscurest man of letters 
in America."] . . . 

Our cousin was at this and all other times very par- 
ticular about his dress and appearance ; it seemed to 
us then that he assumed a certain exaggeration with re- 
gard to them ; we did not understand how consistent it 
all was with his idea of life. . . . 

He was not at all fond of walking, and it is doubtful if 
he cared for mountain scenery for its own sake. He re- 
sponded to the moods of Nature with a sensitiveness that 
was natural to him, but it was her quiet aspects which 
most affected him. He was a native of " the land where 
it is always afternoon." 



220 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

But life was not all play with young Short- 
house. At the age of sixteen his father took him 
into the chemical works which had been founded 
by the great-grandfather, and, although his father 
and later his brother were indulgent to him in 
many ways, the best of his energies went to this 
business until within a few years of his death. 
There is something incongruous, as has been re- 
marked, in the manufacture of vitriol and the 
writing of mystical novels. In 1857 he married 
Sarah Scott, whom he had known for a number 
of years, and the young couple took a house in 
Edgbaston, the suburb of Birmingham in which 
they had both grown up and where they con- 
tinued to live until the end. Mrs. Shorthouse 
tells of the disposition of his hours. He went 
regularly to business at nine, came home to din- 
ner in the middle of the day, and returned to town 
till nearly seven. The evenings, after the first 
hour of relaxation, were mostly devoted to study- 
ing Greek, reading classics and divinity, and the 
seventeenth-century literature, which had always 
possessed a peculiar fascination for him. During 
the years from 1866 to 1876 he was slowly putting 
together his story of yohn Inglesant, and with 
the exception of his wife, no one saw the writing, 
or, indeed, knew that he had a work of any such 
magnitude on hand. For four years he kept the 
completed manuscript, which was rejected by one 
or two publishers, and then, in 1880, he printed 
an edition of a hundred copies for private distri- 



J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 221 

bution. One of these fell into the hands of Mrs. 
Humphry Ward, and through her the Macmil- 
lans became interested in the book, and requested 
to publish it. No one was more amazed at the 
reception of the story than was the author him- 
self He was immediately a man of mark, and 
the doors of the world were thrown open to him. 
Other stories followed, beautiful in thought and 
expression, but too manifestly little more in sub- 
stance than pale reflections of his one great book; 
his message needed no repetition. He died in 
1903, beloved and honoured by all who knew him, 
and it is characteristic of the man that during his 
last years of sufi'ering one or another of the vol- 
umes of John higlesant was always at his side, a 
comfort and a consoling voice to the author as it 
had been to so many other readers. 

Religion was the supreme reality for him as a 
boy, and as a man nearing the hidden goal. His 
family were Quakers, but in 1861 he and his wife 
became members of the Church of England, and 
it was under the influence of that faith his books 
were written. Naturally his letters and the record 
of his life have much to say of religious matters, 
but in one respect they are disappointing. It 
would have been interesting to know a little more 
precisely the nature of his views and the steps by 
which he passed from one form of belief to the 
other. That the anxiety attendant on the change 
cost him heavily and for a while broke down his 
health, we know, and from his published writings 



222 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

it is easy to conjecture the underlying cause of 
the change, but the more human aspect of the 
struggle he underwent is still left obscure. 

Nor is his relation to the three-cornered em- 
broglio within the Church itself anywhere set 
forth in detail. Almost it would seem as if he 
dwelt in some charmed corner of the fold into 
which the reverberations of those terrific words 
Broad and High and Low penetrated only as a 
subdued muttering. To supplement this defect I 
have myself been reading some of the literature 
of that contest, and among other things a series 
of able papers on Le Mouvetncnt Ritualiste dans 
P Aglise Anglicane, which M. Paul Thureau- 
Dangin has just published in the Revue des Deux 
Mondes. The impression left on my own mind 
has been in the highest degree contradictory and 
exasperating. One labours incessantly to know 
what all this tumult is about, and I should sup- 
pose that no more inveterate and vicious display 
of parochialism was ever enacted in this world. 
To pass from these disputes to the religious con- 
flict that was going on in France at the same time 
is to learn in a striking way the difference between 
words and ideas; and even our own pet transcen- 
dental hubbub in Concord is in comparison with 
the Oxford debate vast and cosmopolitan in sig- 
nificance. The intrusion of a single idea into 
that mad logomachy would have been a phenome- 
non more appalling than the appearance of a 
naked body in a I^ondon drawing-room, and it is 



J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 223 

not without its amusing side that one of New- 
man's associates is said to have dreaded " the 
preponderance of intellect among the elements of 
character and as a guide of life ' ' in that perplexed 
apologist. Ideas are not conspicuous anywhere 
in English literature, least of all in its religious 
books, and often one is inclined to extend Bage- 
hot's cynical pleasantry as a cloak for deficiencies 
here, too: the stupidity of the English is the sal- 
vation of their literature as well as of their politics. 
For it is only fair to add that this ecclesiastical 
battle, if paltry in abstract thought, was rich in 
human character and in a certain obstinate per- 
ception of the validity of traditional forms; it was 
at bottom a contest over the position of the Church 
in the intricate hierarchy of society, and pure 
religion was the least important factor under 
consideration. 

Two impulses, which were in reality one, were 
at the origin of the movement. Religion had 
lagged behind the rest of life in that impetuous 
awakening of the imagination which had come 
with the opening of the nineteenth century; it re- 
tained all the dryness and lifeless cant of the 
preceding generation, which had marked about 
the lowest stage of British formalism. Enthusi- 
asm of any sort was more feared than sin. Per- 
haps the first widely recognized sign of change 
was the publication, in 1827, of Keble's Christian 
Year^ although the "Advertisement" to that 
famous book showed no promise of a startling 



224 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

revolution. " Next to a sound rule of faith," 
said the author, " there is nothing of so much 
consequence as a sober standard of feeling in mat- 
ters of practical religion"; and certainly, to one 
who reads those peaceful hymns to-day, sobriety 
seems to have marked them for her own. Yet 
their effect was undoubtedly to import into the 
Church and into the contemplation of churchmen 
something of that enthusiasm, trained now and 
subdued to authority, which had been the posses- 
sion of infidels and sectaries. 

What sudden blaze of song 

Spreads o'er the expanse of Heaven? 

In waves of light it thrills along, 
The angelic signal given — 

" Glory to God ! " from yonder central fire 

Flows out the echoing lay beyond the starry choir; — 

such words men read in the hymn for Christmas 
Day, and they were thrilled to think that the 
imaginative glow, which for a score of years had 
burned in the secular poets, was at last impressed 
into the service of the sanctuary. 

Another impulse, more definite in its nature, 
was the shock of the reform bill. In his Apologia, 
Cardinal Newman, looking back to the early days 
of the Tractarian Movement, declared that " the 
vital question was, How were we to keep the 
Church from being lyiberalised ? " and in his eyes 
the sermon preached by Keble, Jul}^ 14, 1833, on 
the subject of National Apostasy, was the first 



J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 22$ 

sounding of the battle cry. Impelled by the fear 
of the new democratic tendencies, which threat- 
ened to lay hold of the Church and to use it for 
utilitarian ends, the leaders of the opposition 
sought to go back beyond the ordinances of the 
Reformation, and to emphasise the close relation 
of the present forms of worship with those of the 
first Christian centuries; against the invasions of 
the civil government they raised the notion of the 
Church universal and one. The first of the 
famous Tracts, dated September 9, 1833, puts the 
question frankly: 

Should the Government and the Country so far forget 
their God as to cast oflF the Church, to deprive it of its 
temporal honours and substance, on what will you rest 
the claim of respect and attention which you make upon 
your flocks? Hitherto you have been upheld by your 
birth, your education, your wealth, 5'our connexions ; 
should these secular advantages cease, on what must 
Christ's ministers depend "i 

A layman might reply simply, On the truth, 
and Shorthouse, as we shall see, had such an 
answer to make, though couched in more circuit- 
ous language. But not so the Tract: 

I fear we have neglected the real ground on which our 
authority is built— our apostoi,icai. DESCENT. 

That was the Tractarian, or Oxford, Move- 
ment, which united the claims of the imagination 
with the claims of priestcraft, and by a logical 

VOL. ni. — 15. 



226 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

development led the way to Rome. In the Church 
at large, the new leaven worked its way slowly and 
confusedly, but in the end it created a tripartite 
division, which threatened for a while to bring 
the whole establishment down in ruins. The 
first of these, the High Church, is indeed essen- 
tially a continuation, and to a certain extent a 
vulgarisation, of the Oxford Movement. What 
had been a kind of epicurean vision of holy things, 
reserved for a few chosen souls, was now made 
the vehicle of a wide propaganda. The beautiful 
rites of the ancient worship were a powerful se- 
duction to wean the rich from worldly living and 
no less a tangible compensation for the poor and 
outcast. At a later date, under the stress of per- 
secution, the leaders of the party formulated the 
so-called Six Points on which they made a final 
stand: (i) The eastward position; (2) theeuchar- 
istic vestments; (3) altar candles; (4) water min- 
gled with the wine in the chalice; (5) unleavened 
bread; (6) incense — without these there was no 
worship; barely, if at all, salvation. The I^ow 
Church was, in large part, a state of pure hostility 
to these followers of the Scarlet Woman; it was 
loudly Protestant, confining the virtue of religion 
to an acceptance of the dogmas of the Reforma- 
tion, distrusting the symbolical appeal to the 
imagination, and finding the truth too often in 
what was merelj' opposition to Rome. Contrary 
to both, and despised by both, was the Broad 
Church, which held the sacraments so lightly 



J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 22/ 

that, with the Dean of Westminster, it joined in 
communion with Unitarians, and which treated 
dogma so cavalierly that, with Maurice, it thought 
a subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles the 
quickest way to liberty of belief. Yet I cannot 
see that this boasted freedom did much more than 
introduce a kind of license in the interpretation 
of words; it transferred the field of battle from 
forms to formulae. 

From this unpromising soil (intellectually, for 
in character it possessed its giants) was to spring 
the one great religious novel of the English lan- 
guage. I have thought it worth while to recall 
thus briefly, yet I fear tediously, the chief aspects 
of the controversy, because only as the result of a 
profound and, in many respects, violent national 
upheaval can the force and the inner veracity of 
John higlesajit be comprehended. Mrs. Short- 
house fails to dwell on this point; indeed, it would 
appear from her record that the noise of the dis- 
pute reached her husband only from afar off. Yet 
during the years of composition he was dwelling 
in a house at Edgbaston within a stone's throw 
of the Oratory, where, at that time and to the 
end of his life. Cardinal Newman resided, having 
found peace at last in the surrender of his doubts 
to authority. The thought of that venerable man 
and of the agony through which he had come 
must have been often in the novelist's mind. 
And it was during these same ten years of com- 
position that the forces of Low and High were 



.228 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

lined up against each other like two hostile 
armies, under the banners of the English Church 
Union and the Church Association. The activity 
of this latter body, which was founded in 1865 
for the express purpose of " putting down " the 
heresy of ritualism, may be gathered from the fact 
that at a single meeting it voted to raise a fund of 
some $250,000 for the sake of attacking High 
Church clergymen through the processes of law. 
Not without reason was it dubbed the Persecution 
Company limited. 

Now it may be possible with some ingenuity of 
argument — Laud himself had aforetime made such 
an attempt — to regard the Battle of the Churches 
as a contest of the reason; in practice its pro- 
vincialism is due to the fact that it was concerned, 
not with the truth, but with what men had held 
to be the truth. That Mr. Shorthouse was able 
to write a book which is in a way the direct fruit 
of this conflict, and which still contains so much 
of the universal aspect of religion, came, I think, 
from his early Quaker training and from his 
Greek philosophy. It would be a mistake to 
suppose that, on entering the Church of Eng- 
land, he closed in his own breast the door to 
that inner sanctuary of listening silence, the 
innoaicz silentia vitce, where he had been taught 
to worship as a child. At the time of the change 
he could still write to one who w^as distressed at 
his decision: " I grant that Friends, at their com- 
mencement, held with a strong hand perhaps the 



J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 229 

most important truth of this system, the indwell- 
ing of the Divine Word." In reality, there was 
no "perhaps " in Mr. Shorthouse's own adherence 
to this principle, both before and after his con- 
version; only he would place a new emphasis on 
the word "indwelling." The step signified to 
him, as I read his life, a transition from the re- 
ligion of the conscience to that of the imagination, 
from morality to spiritual vision. This voice, 
which the Quakers heard in their own hearts 
alone, and which was an admonition to separate 
themselves from all the false splendours of the 
world, he now heard from stream and flowering 
meadow and from the decorum of courtly society, 
bidding him make beautiful his life, as well as 
holy. Henceforth he could say that "all history 
is nothing but the relation of this great effort — 
the struggle of the divine principle to enter into 
human life." And in the same letter in which 
these words occur — an extraordinary epistle to 
Matthew Arnold, asking him to embody the 
writer's ideas in an essay — he extends his Quaker 
inheritance so far as to make it a cloak for humour, 
a humour, as he says, in " a sense beyond, per- 
haps, that in which it ever has been understood, 
but which, it may be, it is reserved to you to re- 
veal to men." One would like to have Mr. 
Arnold's reply to this divagation on Don Quixote. 
Mr. Shorthouse had, characteristically, adapted 
the book to his own spiritual needs as a re- 
presentation " of the struggles of the divine 



230 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

principle to enter into the everyday details of 
human life." 

It was, I say, his unforgotten discipleship to 
George Fox and to Plato which preserved Mr. 
Shorthouse from the narrowness of the movement 
while permitting him to be faithful to the Church. 
In the Introduction to the Life an ecclesiastical 
friend distinguishes him from the partisan schools 
as a " Broad Church Sacramentarian. ' ' I confess 
in general to a strong dislike for these technical 
phrases, which always savour a little of an evasion 
of realities, and bear about the same relation to 
actual human experience as do the pigeonholes of 
a lawyer's desk; but in this case the words have a 
useful brevity. They show how he had been able 
to take the best from all sides of the controversy 
and to weld these elements into harmony with the 
philosophy of his inheritance and education. The 
position of Mr. Shorthouse was akin to that of the 
Low-Churchmen in his hostility to the Romanis- 
ing tendencies and his distrust of priestcraft, but 
he differed from them still more essentially in his 
recognition of the imagination as equally potent 
with the moral sense in the upbuilding of charac- 
ter. To the Broad-Churchman he was united 
chiefly in his abhorrence of dogmatic tests. One 
of his few published papers (reprinted in the Life) 
is a plea for The Agnostic at Church, — a plea 
which may still be taken to heart by those 
troubled doubters who are held aloof by the 
dogmas of Christianity, yet regret their lonely 



J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 23I 

isolation from the religious aspirations of the 
community: 

There is, however, one principle which underlies all 
church worship with which he [the agnostic] cannot fail 
to sympathise, with which he cannot fail to be in har- 
mony — the sacramental principle. For this is the great 
underlying principle of life, by which the commonest 
and dullest incidents, the most unattractive sights, the 
crowded streets and unlovely masses of people, become 
instinct with a delicate purity, a radiant beauty, become 
the "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual 
grace." Everything may be a sacrament to the pure in 
heart. . . . Kneeling in company with his fellows, 
even if all recollection of a far-away past, with its child- 
hood's faith and fancies, has faded from his mind, it is 
impossible but that some eflfect of sympathy, some magic 
chord and thrill of sweetness, should mollify and refresh 
his heart, blessing with a sweet humility that conscious- 
ness of intellect which, natural and laudable in itself, 
may perhaps be felt by him at moments to be his great- 
est snare. 

But he separated himself from the Broad Church 
in making religion a culture of individual holiness 
rather than a message for the "unlovely masses 
of people," in caring more for the guidance of the 
Inner Voice than for the brotherhood of charity 
or the association of men in good works. In his 
idea of worship he was near to the High Church, 
but he differed from that body in ranking sacer- 
dotalism and dissent together as the equal foes 
of religion. The eflScacy of the sacrament came 
from its historic symbolism and its national 



232 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

acceptance, and needed not, or scarcely needed, the 
ministration of the priest. He thus extended the 
meaning of the word far beyond the narrow range 
of ecclesiasticism. " This sunshine upon the 
grass," he wrote, " is a sacrament of remembrance 
and of love." When, in his early days, Newman 
visited Hurrell Froude's lovely Devonshire home, 
there arose in his mind a poignant strife between 
his loyalty to created and to uncreated beauty. 
In a stanza composed for a lady's autograph 
album he gave this expression to his hesitancy: 

There strayed awhile, amid the woods of Dart, 
One who could love them, but who durst not love ; 
A vow had bound him ne'er to give his heart 
To streamlet bright, or soft secluded grove. 
'T was a hard humbling task, onward to move 
His easy-captured eye from each fair spot, 
With unattached and lonely step to rove 
O'er happy meads which soon its print forgot. 
Yet kept he safe his pledge, prizing his pilgrim lot. 

No such note is to be fotmd in the letters written 
by Mr. Shorthouse during his holidays among 
the Welsh hills; he looked upon the inherited 
Church as the instrument chosen by many gen- 
erations of men for their approach to God, but he 
was not afraid to see the communion service on 
the ocean waters when the heavenly light poured 
upon them, even as he saw it at the altar table. 

If he differed from the Broad Church mainly in 
his loyalty to Quaker mysticism, it was Platonism 
which made the bounds of the High Church too 



J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 233 

narrow for his faith. He did not hesitate at one 
time to say that Plato possessed a truer spiritual 
insight than St. Paul, and it was in reality a mere 
extension of the sphere of Platonism when, in 
what appears to be the last letter he ever wrote 
(or dictated rather, for his hands were already 
clasped in those of beneficent Death), he avowed 
his creed: " That Image after which we were 
created — the Divine Intellect — must surelj^ be 
able to respond to the Divine call. The greatest 
advance which has ever been made was the teach- 
ing, originally by Aristotle, of the receptivity of 
matter. ... I should be very glad to see 
this idea of yohn Itiglesant worked out by an in- 
telligent critic." Beauty was for him a kind of 
transfiguration in which the world, in its response 
to the indwelling Power, was lifted into some- 
thing no longer worldly, but divine; and he could 
speak of our existence on this earth as lighted by 
' ' the immeasurable glory of the drama of God in 
which we are actors." It was not that he, like 
certain poets of the past century, attempted to 
give to the crude passions of men or the transient 
pomp of earth a power intrinsically equivalent to 
the spirit; but he believed that these might be 
made by faith to become as it were an illusory 
and transparent veil through which the visionary 
eye could penetrate to the mystic reality. 

For the particular act in this drama, which he 
was to write out in his religious novel, he went 
back to the seventeenth century, when, as it 



234 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

seemed to him, the same problem as that of the 
nineteenth arose to trouble the hearts of English- 
men, but in nobler and more romantic forms. 
There was, in fact, a certain note of reality about 
the earlier struggle of Puritan, Churchman, and 
Roman Catholic, which was lacking to the quar- 
rel of his own day. John luglesant is the younger 
of twin sons born in a family of Catholic sympa- 
thies. A Jesuit, Father Hall, who reminds one 
not a little of Father Holt in Henry Esmond, is 
put in charge of the boy and trains him up to be 
an intermediary between the Church of England 
and the Church of Rome. To this end his Mentor 
keeps his mind in a state of suspense between the 
faiths, and the inner and real drama of the book 
is the contest in Inglesant's own mind, after his 
immediate debt to Rome has been fulfilled, be- 
tween the two forms of worship. 

In part the actual narrative is well conducted. 
Johnnie's relations to Charles I., and especially 
his share in that strange adventure when the King 
was terrified by a vision of the dead Strafford, are 
told with a good deal of dramatic skill. So, too, 
his own trial, the murder of his brother by the 
Italian, his visits to the household of the Ferrars 
at Little Gidding, and some of the events in Italy 
—these in themselves are sufficient to make a 
novel of unusual interest. On the human side, 
where the emotions are of a dreamy, half-mystical 
sort, the work is equally successful; in its own 
kind the love of Inglesant and Mary Collet is 



J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 235 

beautiful beyond the common love of man and 
woman. But the novel fails, it must be acknow- 
ledged, in the expression of the more ordinary 
motives of human activity. Johnnie's ingrained 
obedience to the Jesuit is one of the mainsprings 
of the plot, yet there is nothing in the story to 
make this exaggerated devotion seem natural. 
In the same way Johnnie's attachment to his 
worldly brother is unexplained by the author, 
and sounds fantastic. A considerable portion of 
the book is taken up with Inglesant's search for 
his brother's murderer, and here again the vacil- 
lating desire of vengeance is a false note which no 
amount of exposition on the part of the author 
makes convincing. Mr. Shorthouse's hero burns 
for revenge one day, and on the next is oblivious 
of his passion, in a way that simply leaves the 
reader in a state of bewilderment. Curiously 
enough, it was one of the incidents in this hide- 
and-seek portion of the story, found by Mr. 
Shorthouse in "a well-known guide-book," that 
actually suggested the novel to him. For my own 
part, the sustained charm of the language, a style 
midway, as it were, between that of Thackeray 
and that of Hawthorne, not quite so negligently 
graceful as the former nor quite so deliberate as 
the latter, yet mingling the elements of both in a 
happy compound — the language alone, I say, 
would be sufficient to carry me through these in- 
adequately conceived parts of the story. But I 
can understand, nevertheless, how in the course 



236 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

of time this feebleness of the purely human motives 
may gradually deprive the book of readers, for it 
is the human that abides unchanged, after all, 
and the divine that alters in form with the pass- 
ing ages. Hawthorne, in this respect, is better 
equipped for the future; his novels are not con- 
cerned with phases of religion, but with the moral 
consciousness and the feeling of guilt, which are 
eternally the same. 

And yet it will be a real loss to letters if this 
nearest approach in English to a religious novel 
of universal significance should lose its vitality 
and be forgotten. Almost, but not quite, Mr. 
Shorthouse has gone below the shifting of forms 
and formulas to the instinct that lies buried in the 
heart of each man, seeking and awaiting the 
light. I have already referred to those early 
chapters, the most perfect in the book I think, 
wherein is told how Johnnie, a grown boy now, 
visits his childhood's masters and questions them 
about the Divine Light which he would behold 
and follow amid the wandering lights of this 
world. Mr. Shorthouse believed, as he had been 
taught at his mother's knee, that such a Guide 
dwelt in the breasts of all men, and that we need 
only to hearken to its admonition to attain holi- 
ness and peace. He thought that it had spoken 
more clearly to certain of the poets and philoso- 
phers of Greece than to any others, and that "the 
ideal of the Greeks — the godlike and the beautiful 
in one" — was still the lesson to be practised to- 



J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 237 

day. " What we want," he said, " is to apply it 
to real life. We all understand that art should 
be religious, but it is more difficult to understand 
how religion may be an art." And this, as he 
avows again and again in his letters, was the 
purpose of his book; "one of many failures to 
reconcile the artistic with the spiritual aspect of 
life," he once calls it. 

But if, intellectually, the vision of the Divine 
Light was vouchsafed to Plato more than to any 
other man, historically it had been presented to 
the gross, unpurged eyes of the world in the life 
and death of Jesus. The precision of dogma, 
even the Bible, meant relatively little to Mr. 
Shorthouse. "I do not advocate belief in 
the Bible," he wrote; "I advocate belief in 
Christ." Somehow, in some way beyond the 
scope of logic, the idea which Plato had beheld, 
the divine ideal which all men know and doubt, 
became a personality that one time, and hence- 
forth the sacraments that recalled the drama of 
that holy life were the surest means of obtaining 
the silence of the world through which the Inner 
Voice speaks and is heard. 

To some, of course, this will appear the one 
flaw in the author's logic — this step from the 
vague notion of the Platonic ideas dwelling in 
the world of matter, and shaping it to their own 
beautiful forms, to the belief in the actual Christ- 
ian drama as the realisation of the Divine Nature 
in human life. Yet the step was easy, was almost 



238 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

necessary, for one who held at the same time the 
doctrines of the Friends and of Plato; their union 
might be called the wedding of pure religion and 
pure philosophy, wherein the more bigoted and 
inhuman character of the former was surrendered, 
while to the latter was added the power to touch 
the universal heart of man. As Mr. Shorthouse 
held them, and as Inglesant came to view them, 
the sacraments might be called a memorial of that 
mystic wedding. They brought to it the historic 
consciousness and the traditional brotherhood of 
mankind; they were the symbolism through which 
men sought to introduce the light into their own 
lives as a religious art. Now an art is a matter 
to be perceived and to be felt, whereas a science, 
as Newman and others held religion to be, is a 
subject for demonstration and argument. How 
much religion in England suJBfered from the at- 
tempt to prove what could not be caught in the 
mesh of logic, and from the endeavour to make 
words take the place of ideas, we have already 
seen. You may reason about abstract truth, you 
cannot reason about a symbolism or a form of 
worship. The strength of John Inglesant lies in 
its avoidance of rationalism or the appeal to 
precedent, and in its frank search for the human 
and the artistic. 

It was in this sense that Mr. Shorthouse could 
speak of his book as above all an attempt "to 
promote culture at the expense of fanaticism, in- 
cluding the fanaticism of work": but we shall 



J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 239 

miss the full meaning of his intention if we omit 
the corollary of those words, viz. : " to exalt the 
unpopular doctrine that the end of existence is 
not the good of one's neighbour, but one's own 
culture." I do not know, indeed, but this exal- 
tation of the old theory that the chief purpose of 
religion is the worship and beatitude of the indi- 
vidual soul, in opposition to the humanitarian 
notions which were even then springing into 
prominence, is the central theme of the story. 
Certainly with many readers the scene that re- 
mains most deeply impressed in their memory is 
that which shows Inglesant coming to Serenus 
de Cressy at the House of the Benedictines in 
Paris, and, like the young man who came to 
Jesus, asking what he shall do to make clear the 
guidance of the Inner lyight. There, in those 
marvellous pages, Cressy points out the divergence 
of the ways before him: " On the one hand, you 
have the delights of reason and of intellect, the 
beauty of that wonderful creation which God 
made, yet did not keep; the charms of Divine 
philosophy, and the enticements of the poet's art; 
on the other side, Jesus." And then as the old 
man, who had himself turned from the gardens 
of Oxford to the discipline of a monastery, sees 
the hesitation of his listener, he breaks forth into 
this eloquent appeal: 

I put before you your life, with no false colouring, no 
tampering with the truth. Come with me to Douay ; you 
shall enter our house according to the strictest rule; you 



240 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

shall engage in no study that is any delight or efiFort to 
the intellect ; but you shall teach the smallest children 
in the schools, and visit the poorest people, and perform 
the duties of the household — and all for Christ. I pro- 
mise you on the faith of a gentleman and a priest — I 
promise you, for I have no shade of doubt — that in this 
path you shall find the satisfaction of the heavenly walk; 
you shall walk with Jesus day by day, growing ever more 
and more like to Him ; and your path, without the least 
fall or deviation, shall lead more and more into the light, 
until you come unto the perfect day ; and on your death- 
bed — the death-bed of a saint — the vision of the smile of 
God shall sustain you, and Jesus Himself shall meet you 
at the gates of eternal life. 

We are told that every word went straight to 
luglesant's conviction, and that no single note 
jarred upon his taste. He implicitly believed that 
what the Benedictine offered him he should find. 
But he also knew that this was not the only way 
of service — nor even, perhaps, the highest. He 
turned away from the monastery sadly, but firmly, 
and continued his search for the light in that 
direction whither the culture of his own nature 
led him; he showed — though this neither he nor 
Mr. Shorthouse, perhaps, would acknowledge — 
that at the bottom of his heart Plato and not 
Christ was his master, and that to him practical 
Christianity was only one of the many historic 
forms which the so-called Platonic insight as- 
sumes among men. To some, no doubt, this at- 
tempt to make of religion an art will savour of that 
peculiar form of hedonism, or bastard Platonism, 



J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 24I 

which Walter Pater introduced into England, and 
John Ij2glesa7it will be classed with Marius the 
Epiairean as a blossom of aesthetic romanticism. 
There is a certain show of justification in the 
comparison, and the work of Mr. Shorthouse 
quite possibly grants too much to the enervating 
acquiescence in the lovely and the decorous; it 
lacks a little in virility. But the difference be- 
tween the two books is still more radical than the 
likeness. Though absolute truth may not be 
within the reach of man, nevertheless the life of 
John Inglesant is a discipline and a growth to- 
ward a verity that emanates from acknowledged 
powers and calls him out of himself. The senses 
have no validity in themselves. He aims to make 
an art of religion, not a religion of art; the dis- 
tinction is deeper than words. The true parent- 
age of the work goes back, in some v/ays, to 
Shaftesbury, with whom an interesting parallel 
might be drawn. 

In the end Inglesant returns to England, after 
years spent in France and Italy among Roman 
Catholics, and accepts frankly the religious forms 
of his own land. His character had been strength- 
ened by experience, and in following the higher 
instincts of his own nature he had attained the 
assurance and the sanctity of one who has not 
quailed before a great sacrifice. The last scene 
in the book, the letter which relates the conversa- 
tion with Inglesant in the Cathedral Church at 
Worcester, should be read as a complement to the 

VOL. III. — 16 



242 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

earlier chapters which describe his boyish search 
for what he was not to find save through the les- 
son of years; the whole book may be regarded as 
a link between these two presentations of the 
hero's life. It would require too many words to 
repeat Inglesant's confession even in outline. 
" The Church of England," says the writer of the 
letter, "is no doubt a compromise, and is power- 
less to exert its discipline. ... If there be 
absolute truth revealed, there must be an inspired 
exponent of it, else from age to age it could not 
get itself revealed to mankind." And Inglesant 
replies: "This is the Papist argument, there is 
only one answer to it — Absolute truth is not re- 
vealed. There were certain dangers w^hich Christ- 
ianity could not, as it would seem, escape. As 
it brought down the sublimest teaching of Platon- 
ism to the humblest understanding, so it was 
compelled, bj' this very action, to reduce spiritual 
and abstract truth to hard and inadequate dogma. 
As it inculcated a sublime indifference to the 
things of this life, and a steadfast gaze upon the 
future, so, by this very means, it encouraged 
the growth of a wild unreasoning superstition." 

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that those 
words, taken with the plea which follows, express 
the finest wisdom struck out of the long and for 
the most part futile Battle of the Churches; they 
were the creed of Mr. Shorthouse, as they were 
the experience of the hero of his book. I would 
end with that image of life as a sacred game with 



J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE 243 

which Inglesant himself closed his confession of 
faith at the Cathedral door: 

The ways are dark and foul, and the grey years bring a 
mysterious future which we cannot see. We are like 
children, or men in a tennis court, and before our con- 
quest is half won the dim twilight comes and stops the 
game ; nevertheless, let us keep our places, and above 
all things hold fast by the law of life we feel within. This 
was the method which Christ followed, and He won the 
world by placing Himself in harmony with that law of 
gradual development which the Divine Wisdom has 
planned. Let us follow in His steps and we shall attain 
to the ideal life; and, without waiting for our "mortal 
passage," tread the free and spacious streets of that Jeru- 
salem which is above. 



THE QUEST OF A CENTURY 

[The scientific part of this essay, indeed the central 
idea which makes it anything more than a philosophic 
vagary, is borrowed from an unpubhshed lecture of my 
brother. Prof. Louis T. More, who holds the chair of 
Physics in the University of Cincinnati. If I have 
printed the paper under my name rather than his, this is 
because he, as a scientist, might not wish to be held re- 
sponsible for the general drift of the thought.] 

The Story is told of Dante that in one of his 
peregrinations through Italy he stopped at a cer- 
tain convent, moved either by the religion of the 
place or by some other feeling, and was there 
questioned by the monks concerning what he 
came to seek. At first the poet did not reply, 
but stood silently contemplating the columns and 
arches of the cloister. Again they asked him 
what he desired; and then slowly turning his 
head and looking at the friars, he answered, 
" Peace! " The anecdote is altogether too sig- 
nificant to escape suspicion; yet as The Divi?ie 
Comedy is supposed to contain symbolically the 
history of the human spirit in its upward growth 
and striving, so this fable of the divine poet 
may be held to sum up in a single word the 
aim and desire of the spirit's endless quest. 
So clearly is the object of our inner search this 

244 



THE QUEST 245 

"peace" which Dante is said to have sought, 
and so close has the spirit come again and 
again to attaining this goal, that it should seem 
as if some warring principle within ourselves 
turned us back ever when the hoped-for consum- 
mation was just within reach. As Vaughan says 
in his quaint way: 

Man is the shuttle, to whose -winding quest 

And passage through these looms 
God ordered motion, but ordained no rest. 

It is possible, I believe, to view the ceaseless 
intellectual fluctuations of mankind backward and 
forward as the varying fortunes of the contest be- 
tween these two hostile members of our being, — 
between the deep-lying principle that impels us to 
seek rest and the principle that drags us back into 
the region of change and motion and forever for- 
bids us to acquiesce in what is found. And I 
believe further that the moral disposition of a 
nation or of an individual may be best character- 
ised by the predominance of the one or the other 
of these two elements. We may find a people, 
such as the ancient Hindus, in whom the longiiig 
after peace was so intense as to make insignificant 
every other concern of life, and among whom the 
aim of saint and philosopher alike was to close 
the eyes upon the theatre of this world's shifting 
scenes and to look only upon that changeless 
vision of 

central peace subsisting at the heart 
Of endless agitation. 



246 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

The spectacle of division and mutation became to 
them at last a mere phantasmagoria, like the 
morning mists that melt away beneath the up- 
springing day-star. 

Again, we may find a race, like the Greeks, in 
whom the imperturbable stillness of the Orient 
and the restless activity of the Occident meet to- 
gether in intimate union and produce that peculiar 
repose in action, that unity in variety, which we 
call harmony or beauty and w'hich is the special 
field of art. But if this harmonious union was a 
source of the artistic sense among the Greeks, 
their logicians, like logicians everywhere, were 
not content until the divergent tendencies were 
drawn out to the extreme; and nowhere is the 
conflict between the two principles mOre vividly 
displayed than in that battle between the followers 
of Xenophanes, who sought to adapt the world 
of change to their haunting desire for peace by 
denying motion altogether, and the disciples of 
Heraclitus, who saw only motion and mutation in 
all things and nowhere rest. "All things flow 
and nothing abides," said the Ephesian, and 
looked upon man in the midst of the universe as 
upon one who stands in the current of a cease- 
lessly gliding river. The brood of Sophists, 
carrying this law into human consciousness, dis- 
claimed the possibility of truth altogether; and it 
is no wonder that Plato, while avoiding the other 
extreme of motionless pantheism, regarded the 
sophistic acceptance of this law of universal flux 



THE QUEST 247 

as the last irreconcilable enemy of philosophy and 
morality alike. " The war over this point is in- 
deed no trivial matter and many are concerned 
therein," said he, not without bitterness. 

It is, when rightly considered, this same ques- 
tion that lends dramatic unity and human value to 
the long debate of the mediaeval schoolmen. Their 
dispute may be regarded from more than one point 
of view, — as a struggle of the reason against the 
bondage of authority, as an attempt to lay bare 
the foundation of philosophy, as a contest between 
science and mysticism; but above all it seems to 
me a long conflict in words between these two 
warring members within us. The desire of in- 
finite peace was the impulse, I think, which drove 
on the realists to that "abyss of pantheism," from 
the brink of which the vision of most men recoils 
as from the horror of shoreless vacuity. In this 
way Erigena, the greatest of realists, spoke of 
God as that which neither acts nor is acted upon, 
neither loves nor is loved; and then, as if fright^ 
ened by these blank words, avowed that God 
though he does not love is in a way lyove itself, 
defining love as the yi?tis quietaque statio of the 
natural motion of all things that move. On the 
other hand it was the impulse toward unresting 
activity which led the nominalists to deny reality 
to the stationary ideas of genera and species, and 
to fix the mind upon the shifting combinations of 
individual objects. In this direction lay the 
labour of accurate observation and experimental 



248 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

classification, and it is with prefect justice that 
Haureau, the historian of scholastic philosophy, 
closes his chapter on William of Occam, the last 
of the schoolmen, with these words: " It is then 
in truth on this soil so well prepared by the prince 
of the nominalists that Francis Bacon founded his 
eternal monument," — and that monument is the 
scientific method as we see it developed in the 
nineteenth century. 

The justification of scholastic philosophy, as I 
understand it, was the hope of finding in the dic- 
tates of pure reason an innnovable resting-place 
for the human spirit; the recoil from the abyss of 
pantheism and absolute quietism was the work of 
the nominalists who in William of Occam finally 
won the day; and with him scholastic philosophy 
brought an end to its own activity. But a greater 
champion than William was needed to wipe away 
what seems to the world the cobwebs of mediaeval 
logomachy. Kant's Critique of Pure Rcasofi ac- 
complished what the nominalistic schoolmen failed 
to achieve: it showed the impossibility of estab- 
lishing by means of logic the dogma of God or 
any absolute conception of the universe. Hence- 
forth the real support of metaphysics was taken 
away, and the study fell more and more into dis- 
repute as the nineteenth century waxed old. 
Not many men to-day look to the pure reason for 
aid in attaining the consummation of faith. That 
consummation, if it be derived at all from ex- 
ternal aid, must come henceforth by way of the 



THE QUEST 249 

imagination and of the moral sense. We say 
with Kant: " Two things fill the mind with ever- 
new and increasing admiration and reverence, the 
oftener and the more persistently they are reflected 
on: the starry heaven above me, and the moral 
law within me." 

But neither the imagination nor the conscience 
alone, any more than reason, can create faith. 
They may prepare the soil for the growth of that 
perfect flower of joy, but they cannot plant the 
seed or give the increase; for they, both the im- 
agination and the conscience, are concerned in the 
end with the light of this life, and faith looks for 
guidance to a different and rarer illumination. 
Faith is a power of itself; /idem rem esse, non 
scientiatn, no7i opinioyiem vel imaghiationein, said 
Zwingle. It is that faculty of the will, mysterious 
in its source and inexplicable in its operation, 
which turns the desire of a man away from con- 
templating the fitful changes of the world toward 
an ideal, an empty dream it may be, or a shadow, 
or a mere name, of peace in absolute changeless- 
ness. Reason and logic may have no words to 
express the object of this desire, but experience 
is rich with the influence of such an aspiration on 
human character. To the saints it was that peace 
of God which passeth all understanding; to the 
mystics it was figured as the raptures of a celestial 
love, as the yearning for that 

Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity. 



250 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

To the ignorant it was the unquestioning trust in 
those who seemed to them endowed with a grace 
beyond their untutored comprehension. 

Even if the imagination or the conscience could 
lift us to this blissful height, they would avail us 
little to-day; for we have put away the imagina- 
tion as one of the pleasant but unfruitful play- 
things of youth, and the conscience in this age of 
humanitarian pity has become less than ever a 
sense of man's responsibility to the supermundane 
powers and more than ever a feeling of brother- 
hood among men. Of faith, speaking generally, 
the past century had no recking, for it turned 
deliberately to observe and study the phenomena 
of change. We call that time, which is still our 
own time, the age of reason, but scarcely with 
justice. The Middle Ages, despite the obscuran- 
tism of the Church, had far better claim to that 
title. One needs but to turn the pages of the 
doctors, even before the day of Abelard who is 
supposed first to have been the champion of reason 
against authority, to see how profound was their 
conviction that in reason might be discovered a 
justification of the faith they held. And indeed 
Abelard is styled the champion of reason because 
only with him do men begin to perceive the in- 
ability of reason to establish faith. Better we 
should call ours an age of observation, for never 
before have men given themselves with such com- 
plete abandon to observing and recording sys- 
tematically. By long and intent observation of 



THE QUEST 25 1 

the phenomenal world the eye has discovered a 
seeming order in disorder, the shifting visions of 
time have assumed a specious regularity which 
we call law, and the mind has made for itself a 
home on this earth which to the wise of old 
seemed but a house of bondage. 

For life is but a dream whose shapes return, 
Some frequently, some seldom, some by night 

And some by day, some night and day : we learn, 
The while all change and many vanish quite, 

In their recurrence with recurrent changes 

A certain seeming order ; where this ranges 
We count things real ; such is memory's might. 

From this wealth of observation and record the 
modern age, and especially the century just past, 
has developed two fields of intellectual activity to 
such an extent as almost to claim the creation of 
them. Gradually through accumulated observa- 
tion the nineteenth century came to look on human 
affairs in a new light; like everything else they 
were seen to be subject to the Heraclitean ebb and 
flow; and history was written from a new point of 
view. We learned to regard eras of the past as sub- 
ject each to its peculiar passions and ambitions, 
and this taught us to throw ourselves back into 
their life with a kind of sympathy never before 
known. We did not judge them by an immutable 
code, but by reference to time and place. Nor is 
this all. Within the small arc of our observation 
we observed a certain regularity of change similar 
to the changes due to growth in an individual, and 



252 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

this we called the law of progress. Historj' was 
then no longer a mere chronicle of events or, if 
philosophical, the portrayal and judgment of 
characters from a fixed point of view; it became 
at its best the systematic examination of the 
causes of progress and development. And nat- 
urally this attention to change and motion, this 
historic sense, was extended to every other branch 
of human interest: in religion it taught Christ- 
ians to accept the Bible as the history of revelation 
instead of something complete from the beginning; 
in literature it taught us to portray the devel- 
opment of character or the influence of environ- 
ment on character rather than the interplay of 
fixed passions; in art it created impressionism 
or the endeavour to reproduce what the individual 
sees at the moment instead of a rationalised pic- 
ture; in criticism it introduced what Sainte- 
Beuve, the master of the movement, sought to 
write, a history of the human spirit. 

But histor)'^, like Cronos of old, possessed a 
strange power of devouring its own offspring. 
Gradually, from the habit of regarding human 
affairs in a state of flux and more particularly 
from the growth of the idea of progress, the past 
lost its hold over men. It became a matter of 
curiosity but not of authority, and history as it 
was understood in Renan's day has in ours almost 
ceased to be written. Science on the other hand 
is the observation of phenomena regarded chiefly 
in the relation of space — for it is correct, I believe. 



THE QUEST 253 

to assert that the laws of energy may be reduced 
to this point — and as such is not subject to this 
devouring act of time. It frankly discards the 
past and as frankly dwells in the present. It is 
not my purpose, indeed it would be quite super- 
fluous, to reckon up the immense acquisitions of 
the scientific method in the past century: they are 
the theme of schoolboys and savants alike, the 
pride and wonder of our civilisation. Nor need I 
dwell on the new philosophy which sprang up 
from the union of the historic and the scientific 
sense and still subsists. Not the system of Hegel 
or Schopenhauer or of any other professor of 
metaphysics is the true philosophy of the age; 
these are but echoes of a past civilisation, voices 
2in6i praterea nil. Evolution is the living guide 
of our thought, assigning to the region of the un- 
knowable the conceptions of unity and perfect rest, 
and building up its theories on the visible ex- 
perience of motion and change and development. 
It has reduced the universal flux of Heraclitus to 
a scientific system and assimilated it to our inner 
growth; it has become as essentially a factor of 
our attitude toward the natural world as Newton's 
laws of gravitation. 

But if our thoughts are directed almost wholly 
to the sphere of motion, yet this does not mean 
that the longing after quietude and peace has 
passed entirely from the mind of man; the thirst 
of the human heart is too deep for that. Only 
the world has learned to look for peace in another 



254 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

direction. In place of that faith which would 
deny valid reality to changing forms, we have 
taught ourselves to find a certain order in disorder, 
which we call law, — whether it be the law of pro- 
gress or the law of energy, — and on the stability 
of this law we are willing to stake our desired 
tranquillity. 

In this way, through what may be called the 
oflfspring begotten on the historic sense by science, 
the mind has turned its regard into the future and 
seemed to discern there a continuation of the same 
law of progress which it saw working in the past. 
Hence have arisen the manifold dreams and 
visions of socialism, altruism, humanitarianism, 
and all the other isms that would fix the hope of 
mankind upon some coming perfectibilitj'' of hu- 
man life, and that like Prometheus in the play 
have implanted blind hopes in the hearts of men. 
It is indeed one of the most curious instances of 
the recrudescence of ideas to see the mediaeval 
visions of a city of golden streets and eternal bliss 
in another existence brought down to the future 
of this world itself. What to the mystic of that 
age was to come suddenly, with the twinkling of 
an eye, when we are changed and have put away 
mortal things, when the angel of the Apocalypse 
has sworn that time shall be no longer, — all this, 
the heavenly city of joy and endless content, is 
now to be the natural outcome here in this world 
of causes working in time. The theory is beauti- 
ful in itself and might satisfy the hunger of the 



THE QUEST 255 

heart, even though its main hope concerns only- 
generations to come, were it not for a lingering 
and fatal suspicion that progress does not involve 
increased capability of happiness to the individual, 
and that somehow the race does not move toward 
content. Physical comfort has perhaps become 
more widely distributed, but of the placid joy of 
life the recent years have known singularly little; 
we need but turn over the pages of the more rep- 
resentative poets and prose writers of the past 
sixty years to discover how deep is the unrest of 
our souls. The higher literature has come to be 
chiefly the " blank misgivings of a creature mov- 
ing about in worlds not realised ' ' ; and missing 
the note of deeper peace we sigh at times even for 

A draught of dull complacency. 

Alas, those who would find a resting-place for 
the .spirit in the relations of man to man seem 
not to reckon that the very essence — if such a 
term may be used of so contingent a nature — 
that the very essence of this world's life is 
motion and change and contention, and that Peace 
spreads her wings in another and purer atmos- 
phere. One might suppose that a single glance 
into the heart would show how vain are such 
aspirations, and how utterly dreary and illusory 
is every conceived ideal of progress and socialism 
because each and all are based on an inherent con- 
tradiction. He who waits for peace until the 
course of events has become stable is like the silly 



256 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

peasant by the river side, watching and waiting 
while the current flows forever and will ever flow. 
Not less vain is the hope of those who would 
find in the laws of science a permanent abiding 
place — perhaps one should say was rather than is, 
for the avowed gospel of science which was to 
usurp the ofl&ce of olden-time religious faith is 
already like the precedent historic sense, itself be- 
coming a thing of the past. Yet the much dis- 
cussed war between science and religion is none 
the less real because to-day the din of battle has 
ceased. It does not depend on criticism of the 
Mosaic story of creation by the one, nor on hos- 
tility to progress offered by the other. These 
things were only signs of a deeper and more 
radical difference: religion is the voice of faith 
uttering in symbols of the imagination its distrust 
of the world as a scene of deception and unreality, 
whereas science is the attempt to discover fixed 
laws in the midst of this very world of change. 
If to-day the strife between the two seems recon- 
ciled, this only means that faith has grown dim- 
mer and that science has learned the futility of its 
more dogmatic assumptions.' 

' Yet even while I read the proof of this page there 
lies before me an article in the Contemporary Review 
(July, 1905), in which Sir Oliver Lodge utters the 
old assumptions of science with childlike simplicity. 
"I want to urge," he says, " that my advocacy of science 
and scientific training is not really due to any wish to be 
able to travel faster or shout further round the earth, or 
to construct more extensive towus, or to consume more 



THE QUEST 257 

The very growth of science is in fact a gradual 
recognition of motion as the basis of phenomena 
and an increasing comprehension of what maj' be 
called the laws of motion. When motion was re- 
garded as simple and regular, it seemed possible 
to explain phenomena by correspondingly simple 
and regular laws; but when each primary motion 

atmosphere and absorb more rivers, nor even to overcome 
disease, prolong human life, grow more corn, and cul- 
tivate to better advantage the kindly surface of the earth; 
though all these latter things will be ' added unto us ' if 
■we persevere in high aims. But it is none of these 
things which should be held out as the ultimate object 
and aim of humanity — the gain derivable from a genuine 
pursuit of truth of every kind ; no, the ultimate aim can 
be expressed in many ways, but I claim that it is no less 
than to be able to comprehend what is the length and 
breadth and depth and height of this mighty universe, 
including man as part of it, and to know not man and 
uature alone, but to attain also some incipient compre- 
hension of what the saints speak of as the love of God 
which passeth knowledge, and so to begin an entrance 
into the fulness of an existence beside which the joy 
even of a perfect earthly life is but as the happiness of 
a summer's day." The sentiment is beautiful, but what 
shall we say of the logic ? To speak of attaining through 
science a comprehension, even an incipient comprehen- 
sion, of that which passeth knowledge^ is to fall into that 
curious confusion of ideas to which the scientifically 
trained mind is subject when it goes beyond its own 
field. "Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will 
demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou 
when I laid the foundations of the earth ? Declare, if 
thou hast understanding." Has Sir Oliver read the Book 

of Job ? 

VOL. HI. — 17. 



258 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

was seen to be the resultant of an infinite series 
of motions the question became in Hke manner in- 
finitely complex, or in other words insoluble. 
But to be clear we must consider the matter more 
in detail. 

From the days of the old Greek Heraclitus, who 
built up his theory of the world on the axiom of 
eternal flux and change, the Doctrine of Motion 
as a distinct enunciation has hngered on in the 
world well-nigh unnoticed and buried from sight 
in the bulk of suppositions and guesses that have 
made up the passing systems of philosophy. 
Now and then some lonely thinker took up the 
doctrine, but only to let it drop back into ob- 
scurity; until during the great burst of scientific 
enquiry in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it 
assumed new significance and began to grow. 
From that time to this its progress in acceptance 
as the basis of phenomena may be regarded as a 
measure of scientific advance. 

By a strange fatality Kant, who had been so 
efficient as an iconoclast in metaphysics, was per- 
haps with his nebular hypothesis, followed later 
by the work of Goethe on animal and plant varia- 
tions, the one most largely responsible for the new 
hope that in science at last was to be found an 
answer to the riddle of existence which had baflQed 
the search of pure reason. The achievement of 
Kant both destructive and constructive is well 
known, if vaguely understood, by the world at 
large; but it is not so well known that a contem- 



THE QUEST 259 

porary of Kant did precisely for science what the 
sage of Konigsberg accomplished in metaphysics. 
In the very decade in which The Critique of Pure 
Reason saw the light, Lagrange, a scholar of 
France, published a work which carried the ana- 
lytic method, or the method of motion, to its 
farthest limit. In this work, the Mecanique 
Analytique, Lagrange develops an equation from 
which it can be proved conclusively that to ex- 
plain any group of phenomena measured by 
energy an infinite number of hypotheses may be 
employed. So, for instance, if we establish any 
one theory which will suflBiciently account for the 
known phenomena of light, such as reflection, re- 
fraction, polarisation, etc., there will yet remain 
an infinite number of other hypotheses equally 
capable of explaining the same group of phe- 
nomena. Or to use the words of Poincare: "If 
then we can give one complete mechanical ex- 
planation of a phenomenon, there will also be 
possible an infinite number of others which will 
account equally well for all the particulars re- 
vealed by experiment." That is to say, no ex- 
perimentuvi crucis can be imagined which will 
reveal the truth or error of any given theory. 
This restriction on the finality of our knowledge 
is borne out in all physical reasoning, — and I 
venture also to say in the other sciences; thus in 
optics we can perform no experiment which will 
establish as finally true the theory that light is 
caused by the motion of corpuscles of matter 



26o SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

emitted from a luminous body, or that it is due to 
vibrations propagated through a medium by a 
wave motion, or that it is generated by certain 
disturbances in the electrical state of bodies. 
Each of these hypotheses has its advantages and 
disadvantages; and in our choice we merely adopt 
that theory which explains the greater number of 
phenomena in the simplest way. 

If any one should here ask: Granted that from 
phenomena expressed in terms of energy no ulti- 
mate law can be educed, yet may not some other 
view of phenomena lead to other results? We 
answer that no other view is possible. Not that 
the s}' stem of the universe, if we may use such an 
expression, is necessarily constructed on what we 
call energy, but that our minds can conceive it 
onl}^ in terms of energy. An analysis of the con- 
cepts which enter into the idea of energy must 
make it evident that in our understanding of na- 
ture we cannot go beyond this point. 

There is an agreement among philosophers and 
scientists that the concept of space is not derived 
from external experience, but is inherently intui- 
tive. As stated by Kant : 

The representation of space cannot be borrowed through 
experience from relations of external phenomena, but, on 
the contrary, those external phenomena become possible 
only by means of the representation of space. Space is a 
necessary representation, a priori, forming the very foun- 
dation of external intuitions. It is impossible to imagine 
that there should be no space, though it is possible to 
imagine space without objects to fill it. 



THE QUEST 261 

The concept of space therefore makes possible the 
intuition of external phenomena; but these phe- 
nomena to be realised must appeal to one of our 
senses, and this connecting link between the outer 
world and our consciousness is the concept which 
we call time. Quoting again from Kant: 

Time is the formal condition, a priori , of all phenom- 
ena whatsoever. But, as all representations, whether 
they have for their objects external things or not, belong 
by themselves, as determinations of the mind, to our 
inner state ; . . . therefore, if I am able to say, a 
priori, that all external phenomena are in space, I can, 
according to the principle of the internal sense, make 
the general assertion that all phenomena, that is, all ob- 
jects of the senses, are in titne, and stand necessarily in 
relations of time. 

It follows, then, that our simplest possible expres- 
sion for phenomena will be in terms of space and 
time, and that beyond this the human mind can- 
not go. 

Turning here from metaphysical to scientific 
language, we speak of space and time as the 
fundamental units from which we deduce the 
laws of the external world. The fact that space 
appeals to us only through time furnishes us with 
our concept or unit of motion, which is the ratio 
of space to time. The external phenomena so 
revealed to us we call the manifestations of mass 
or energy, thus providing ourselves with a second 
unit. It must be observed, however, that mass 
or energy is not a new concept, but bears precisely 
the same relation to motion as Kant's Ding-an- 



262 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

sich bears to space and time: it is the unknowable 
cause of motion, — or more properly speaking it is 
the ability residing in an object to change the 
motion of another object and is measured by the 
degree of change it can produce. And I say mass 
or energy, advisedly, for the two are merely differ- 
ent names or different views of the same thing; 
we cannot conceive of matter without energy or 
of energy without matter. Our choice between 
the two depends solely on the simplicity and con- 
venience with which deductions may be made 
from one or the other. From a physical stand- 
point the concept energy is rather the simpler, but 
mathematically our deductions flow more readily 
from the concept mass. 

If then our explanations of phenomena must 
ultimately involve the two units of motion and 
of energy or mass, and if it can be demonstrated 
that on this basis we may account for any group 
of phenomena in an infinite number of ways, what 
shall we say but that the attempt to attain any 
resting-place for the mind in the laws of nature is, 
and must always be, futile? Further than this, 
any given law is itself only an approximate ex- 
planation of phenomena, and must be continually 
modified as we add to our experimental know- 
ledge. In all cases a law must be considered valid 
only within the limits of the sensitiveness of the 
instruments by which we get our measurements. 
With more delicate instruments variations will be 
observed that must be expressed by additional 



THE QUEST 263 

terms in the formula. Thus we maintain that 
the law of gravitation is true only within the 
range of our observation; it does not apply to 
masses of molecular dimensions. Another for- 
mula, the well-known law of the pressure of gases, 
can be shown by experiment to be merely at 
approximation, because the variations in it are 
not of a dimension negligible in comparison with 
the sensibility of our instruments. As the pres- 
sure increases the error in the formular equation 
becomes constantly greater. To remedy this a 
second approximation, which is still inadequate, 
has been added to the equation by Van der Waals; 
yet greater accuracy will require the addition of 
other terms; and a complete demonstration would 
demand an infinite series of approximations. 

The meaning of all this is quite plaia : there is 
no reach of the human intellect which can bridge 
the gap between motion and rest. Our senses 
are adapted to a world of universal flux which is, 
so far as we can determine, subject to no absolute 
law but the law of probabilities. He who attempts 
to circumscribe the ebb and flow of circumstance 
within the bounds of our spiritual needs, he who 
attempts to find peace in any formula of science 
or in any promise of historic progress, is like one 
who labours on the old and vain problem of squar- 
ing the circle : 

Qual e'l geom&tra, clie tutto s'affige 
Per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova, 
Pensando, quel principio ond' egli indige. 



264 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 

The desire of peace, as the world has known it in 
past times, signified always a turning away from 
the flotsam and jetsam of time and an attempt to 
fix the mind on absolute rest and unity, — the de- 
sire of peace has been the aspiration of faith. 
And because the object of faith cannot be seen by 
the eyes of the body or expressed in terms of the 
understanding, a firm grasp of the will has been 
necessary to keep the desire of the heart from 
falling back into the visible, tangible things of 
change and motion. For this reason, when the 
will is relaxed, doubts spring up and men give 
themselves wholly to the transient intoxication 
of the senses. Yet blessed are they that believe 
and have not seen. It was the peculiar quest of 
the nineteenth century to discover fixed laws and 
an unshaken abiding place for the mind in the 
very kingdom of unrest; we have sought to chain 
the waves of the sea with the winds. 

And how does all this affect one who stands 
apart, striving in his own small way to live in the 
serene contemplation of the universe ? I cannot 
doubt that there are some in the world to-day who 
look back over the long past and watch the toil- 
ing of the human race toward peace as a traveller 
in the Alps may with a telescope follow the moun- 
tain-climbers in their slow ascent through the 
snows of Mont Blanc; or again they watch our 
labours and painstaking in the valley of the senses 
and wonder at our grotesque industry; or look 
upon the striving of men to build a city for the 



THE QUEST 265 

soul amid the uncertainties of this life, as men 
look at the play of children who build castles and 
domes in the sands of the seashore and cry out 
when the advancing waves wash all their hopes 
away. I think there are some such men in the 
world to-day who are absorbed in the fellowship 
of the wise men of the East, and of the no less 
wise Plato, with whom they would retort upon the 
accusing advocates of the present: "Do you think 
that a spirit full of lofty thoughts, and privileged 
to contemplate all time and all existence, can 
possibly attach any great importance to this life?" 
They live in the world of action, but are not of it. 
They pass each other at rare intervals on the 
thoroughfares of life and know each other by a 
secret sign, and smile to each other and go on 
their way comforted and in better hope. 



the; bnd. 



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